To set correct system variable values is the essential step to get the correct server behavior against the workload.
In MySQL, we have many System variables that can be changed at runtime, and most of them can be set at the session or global level.

To change the value of a system variable at the global level in the past, users needed to have SUPER privileges. Once the system variable value is modified as global, the server will change this behavior for the session, and obviously as global scope.

For instance, one of the most commonly adjusted variables is probably max_connections.

If you have max_connection=100 in your my.cnf or as the default value, and during the day as DBA you notice that it is not enough, it is easy just to add new connections on the fly with the command:

SET GLOBAL …

I was recently faced with a real issue about completely exhausting the disk space on MySQL. This was a serious issue because of the continuous outages of the service, as the customer had to constantly restart the server and wait for the next outage.

What was happening? In this article, I’m going to explain it and propose solutions.

Implicit temporary tables

MySQL needs to create implicit temporary tables for solving some kinds of queries. The queries that require a sorting stage most of the time need to rely on a temporary table. For example, when you use GROUP BY, ORDER BY or DISTINCT.  Such queries are executed in two stages: the first is to gather the data and put them into a temporary table, the second is to execute the sorting on the temporary table.

A temporary table is also needed in case of some UNION statements evaluation, for …

I think it is often confusing to compare upstream MySQL and Percona Server for MySQL, and some helpful information can be found in the introductory notes. But what does that really mean for an ordinary DBA, especially if none of the known big extra features are important in a particular use case?

In this article, I would like to start a series of short blog posts highlighting small, often less known, but potentially useful features, available in Percona Server for MySQL. Let’s start with a relatively new feature.

Limit the disk space used by binary logs problem

Historically, dealing with binary logs and the disk space used by them was quite challenging. The only thing that let you control this is the …

It’s bad practice to provide world-writable access to critical files in Linux, though we’ve seen time and time again that this is done to conveniently share files with other users, applications, or services. But with Xtrabackup, preparing backups could go wrong if the backup configuration has world-writable file permissions.

Say you performed a backup on a MySQL instance configured with data-at-rest encryption using the keyring plugin. On the backup directory, the generated backup-my.cnf contains these instructions to load this plugin that will be used by Xtrabackup while preparing the backup:

backup-my.cnf

[mysqld]
innodb_checksum_algorithm=crc32
innodb_log_checksum_algorithm=strict_crc32
innodb_data_file_path=ibdata1:12M:autoextend
innodb_log_files_in_group=2
innodb_log_file_size=1073741824
innodb_fast_checksum=false
innodb_page_size=16384
innodb_log_block_size=512
innodb_undo_directory=./ …

Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.7.26-31.37 on June 26, 2019. Binaries are available from the downloads section or from our software repositories.

Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.7.26-31.37 is now the current release, based on the following:

• Percona Server for MySQL 5.7.26-29
• Codership WSREP API release 5.7.25
• Codership Galera library 3.26

All Percona software is open-source and free.

Bugs Fixed

• PXC-2480: In some …

Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.6.44-28.34 on June 19, 2019. Binaries are available from the downloads section or from our software repositories.

Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.6.44-28.34 is now the current release, based on the following:

• Percona Server 5.6.44-86.0
• Codership WSREP API release 5.6.43
• Codership Galera library 3.26

All Percona software is open-source and free.

Bugs Fixed

• PXC-2480: In some …

Please join Percona’s Principal Support Engineer Sveta Smirnova as she presents Billion Goods in Few Categories: How Histograms Save a Life?

Watch the Recorded Webinar

We store data with the intention to use it: search, retrieve, group, sort, etc. To perform these actions effectively, MySQL storage engines index data and communicate statistics with the Optimizer when it compiles a query execution plan. This approach works perfectly well unless your data distribution is uneven.

Last year I worked on several tickets where data followed …

Sysbench has long been established as the de facto standard when it comes to benchmarking MySQL performance. Percona relies on it daily, and even Oracle uses it when blogging about new features in MySQL 8. Sysbench comes with several pre-defined benchmarking tests. These tests are written in an easy-to-understand scripting language called Lua. Some of these tests are called: oltp_read_write, oltp_point_select, tpcc, oltp_insert. There are over ten such scripts to emulate various behaviors found in standard OLTP applications.

But what if your application does not fit the pattern of traditional OLTP? How can you continue to utilize the power of load-testing, benchmarking, …

Python 2 reaches EOL on 2020-01-01 and one of its commonly used third-party packages is MySQL-python. If you have not yet migrated away from both of these, since MySQL-python does not support Python 3, then you may have come across some issues if you are using more recent versions of MySQL and are enforcing a secured installation. This post will look at two specific issues that you may come across (caching_sha2_password in MySQL 8.0 and TLSv1.2 with MySQL >=5.7.10 when using OpenSSL) that will prevent you from connecting to a MySQL database and buy …

In this blog, I will provide answers to the Q & A for the MySQL 8.0 Architecture and Enhancement webinar.

First, I want to thank everybody for attending my April 9, 2019, webinar. The recording and slides are available here. Below is the list of your questions that I was unable to answer fully during the webinar.

Q: What kind of Encryption levels does MySQL 8.0 provide?

The MySQL data-at-rest encryption feature supports the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) block-based encryption algorithm and aes_256_cbc encryption algorithm for data at rest is hard coded.

Q: At what frequency does the redo log buffer flush the changes to disk? When is the commit variable set to zero?

…