Buying software solutions for your company is a skill just like any other business practice. To be effective at purchasing it is necessary to have a clear understanding of what you require and a plan on how to evaluate potential vendors. When time is also a factor a working knowledge of the internal buying processes and expectations of your employer are also important.

The wide variety of similar sounding products with hard to distinguish feature differentiators can be daunting. In order to get the right software at a competitive price within the desired timeframe there are 4 important things to consider.

Here’s the short list:

• Define requirements by focusing on needs instead of features
• Prepare your budget, know your buying process
• Check provider quality and support
• Make the most of your trial period

And here’s the longer one: …

Calling all developers, DBAs, engineers, SREs, and database aficionados: we’re hitting the road and hope to see you along the way. It's always a highlight of our year when we get to meet up with our users and friends face-to-face, and we'll be attending events across the country (and abroad!) for the rest of 2018. If you see our booth, come say hello. 

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Below is a list of the places you'll be able to find us over the next nine months, plus descriptions of how we'll be involved at each event (and, in some cases, special ticket discount codes).

In this blog post, we’ll review additional Amazon Aurora MySQL monitoring capabilities we’ve added in Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) 1.7.0. You can see them in action in the MySQL Amazon Aurora Metrics dashboard.

Amazon Aurora MySQL Transaction Commits

This graph looks at the number of commits the Amazon Aurora engine performed, as well as the average commit latency. As you can see from this graph, latency does not always correlate with the number of commits performed and can be quite high in certain situations.

Amazon Aurora MySQL …

In this blog post, we’ll introduce how you can look at some experimental Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) features using Percona Labs builds on GitHub.

Note: PerconaLabs and Percona-QA are open source GitHub repositories for unofficial scripts and tools created by Percona staff. While not covered by Percona support or services agreements, these handy utilities can help you save time and effort.

Percona software builds located in the PerconaLabs and Percona-QA repositories are not officially released software, and also aren’t covered by Percona support or services agreements. 

Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) is a free and open-source platform for managing and …

Percona announces the release of Percona Monitoring Plugins 1.1.8.

Changelog

• Add MySQL 5.7 support
• Changed a canary check to use timestamp.now() and return a timedelta.seconds
• Remove an additional condition for the Dictionary memory allocated
• Fixed a false-positive problem when the calculated delay was less than 0 and the -m was not set.
• Fixed the problem where slaves would alert due to deadlocks on the master.
• If using pt-heartbeat, get_slave_status was only called when the -s option is set to …

In order to improve observability and manageability of MySQL Group Replication (GR), we enhanced its instrumentation in MySQL 8.0.4. With these goals in mind, we have extended the usage of Performance Schema (P_S) from this plugin to the included Group Communication System (GCS) module as well as its submodule eXtended Communications (XCom) which are responsible for all communication involved in the dissemination of transactions to other MySQL instances.…

Join Percona’s Chief Evangelist, Colin Charles as he presents Differences Between MariaDB and MySQL on Wednesday, January 24, 2018, at 7:00 am PST (UTC -8) / 10:00 am EST (UTC -5).

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Tags: MariaDB, MySQL, Percona Server for MySQL, DBA, SysAdmin, DevOps
Experience Level: Novice

MariaDB and MySQL. Are they syntactically similar? Where do these two query languages differ? Why would I use one over the other?

MariaDB is on the path of gradually diverging from MySQL. One obvious example is the internal data …

Join Percona’s Product Manager Michael Coburn as he presents MySQL Troubleshooting and Performance Optimization with Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) Part 2 on Thursday, January 18, 2018, at 11:00 am PST / 2:00 pm EST (UTC-8).

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Tags: Percona Monitoring and Management, PMM, Monitoring, MySQL, Performance, Optimization, DBA, SysAdmin, DevOps
Experience Level: Expert

Optimizing MySQL performance and troubleshooting MySQL problems are two of the most critical and challenging tasks for …

Having good historial metrics monitoring in place is critical for properly operating, maintaining and troubleshooting database systems, and Percona Monitoring and Management is one of the options we recommend to our clients for this.

One common concern among potential users is how using this may impact their database’s performance. As I could not find any conclusive information about this, I set out to do some basic tests and this post shows my results.

To begin, let me describe my setup. I used the following Google Cloud instances:

• One 4 vCPU instance for the MySQL server
• One 2 vCPU instance for the sysbench client
• One 1 vCPU instance for the PMM server

I used Percona Server 5.7 and PMM 1.5.3 installed via Docker. Slow query log was enabled with long_query_time set to 0 …

Cloud-based Relational Database Services (RDS) offer businesses a variety of traditional Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMS) with several management and configuration options. In the Top 10 Things to Know about Amazon RDS blog, we covered Amazon RDS. In today’s article, we’ll be presenting Alibaba Cloud RDS. If you’ve been considering moving some or all of your database infrastructure to Alibaba Cloud RDS, or any Cloud RDS for that matter, there are many things to consider. Here are the top 10 things you need to know before taking the plunge.

About Alibaba Cloud RDS

Alibaba Cloud RDS, whose full name is Alibaba Cloud ApsaraDB for RDS, is an on-demand database service that handles some of the administrative tasks associated with managing a database, thus leaving you with more time to focus on your core business. …