Please join Percona’s Chief Technology Officer, Vadim Tkachenko, as he presents How to Rock with MyRocks on Thursday, January 17th at 10:00 AM PDT (UTC-7) / 1:00 PM EDT (UTC-4).

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MyRocks is a new storage engine from Facebook and is available in Percona Server for MySQL. In what cases will you want to use it? We will check different workloads and when MyRocks is most suitable for you. Also, as for any new engine, it’s important to set it up and tune it properly. So, we will review the most important settings to pay attention to.

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One of the most exciting features Amazon Aurora Serverless brings to the table is its ability to go to sleep (pause) when idle. This is a fantastic feature for development and test environments. You get access to a powerful database to run tests quickly, but it goes easy on your wallet as you only pay for storage when the instance is paused.

You can configure Amazon RDS Aurora Serverless to go to sleep after a specified period of time. This can be set to anywhere between five minutes and 24 hours

For this feature to work, however, inactivity has to be complete. If you have so much as a single query or even maintain an idle open connection, Amazon Aurora Serverless will not be able to pause.

This means, for example, that pretty much any monitoring you may have enabled, including our own …

Please join Percona’s MySQL Product Manager, Tyler Duzan as he presents Walkthrough of Percona Server MySQL 8.0 on Wednesday, January 9th at 11:00 AM PDT (UTC-7) / 2:00 PM (UTC-4).

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Our Percona Server for MySQL 8.0 software is the company’s free, enhanced, drop-in replacement for MySQL Community Edition. The software includes all of the great features in MySQL Community Edition 8.0. Additionally, it includes enterprise-class features from Percona made available free and open source. …

Amazon Aurora with MySQL Compatibility comes in three editions which, at the time of writing, have quite a few differences around the features that they support.  Make sure you don’t assume the newer Aurora 2.x supports everything in Aurora 1.x. On the contrary, right now Aurora 1.x (MySQL 5.6 based) supports most Aurora features.  The serverless option was launched for this version, and it’s not based on the latest MySQL 5.7.  However, the serverless option, too, has its own set of limitations

I found a concise comparison of what is available in which Amazon Aurora edition hard to come by so I’ve created one.  The table was compiled based mostly on documentation research, so if you spot some mistakes please let me know and I’ll make a correction.

Please keep in mind, this is expected to …

… or what I should keep in mind in case of disaster

To retrieve and maintain in SQL format the definition of all tables in a database, is a best practice that we all should adopt. To have that under version control is also another best practice to keep in mind.

While doing that may seem redundant, it can become a life saver in several situations. From the need to review what has historically changed in a table, to knowing who changed what and why… to when you need to recover your data and have your beloved MySQL instance not start…

But let’s be honest, only a few do the right thing, and even fewer keep that information up to date. Given that’s the case, what can we do when we have the need to discover/recover the table structure?

From the beginning, MySQL has used some external files to describe its internal structure.

For instance, if I have a schema named windmills and a table …

Working on a test case with sysbench, I encountered this:

mysql> select * from sbtest1 where id = round(rand()*10000, 0);
+------+--------+-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+-------------------------------------------------------------+
| id   | k      | c                                                                                                                       | pad                                                         |
+------+--------+-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+-------------------------------------------------------------+
|  179 | 499871 | 09833083632-34593445843-98203182724-77632394229-31240034691-22855093589-98577647071-95962909368-34814236148-76937610370 | 62233363025-41327474153-95482195752-11204169522-13131828192 |
| 1606 | 502031 | …

Continuing on the series of blog posts about MySQL High Availability, today we will talk about stale reads and how to overcome this issue.

The Problem

Stale reads is a read operation that fetches an incorrect value from a source that has not synchronized an update operation to the value (source Wiktionary).

A practical scenario is when your application applies INSERT or UPDATE data to your master/writer node, and has to read it immediately after. If this particular read is served from another server in the replication/cluster topology, the data is either not there yet (in case of an INSERT) or it still provides the old value (in case of an UPDATE).

If your application or part of your application …

The settings of MySQL configuration variables have a fundamental impact on the performance of your database system. Sometimes it can be a little tricky to predict how changing one variable can affect others, and especially when dealing with cases like the one I’ll describe in this post, where the outcome is not very intuitive. So here, we’ll look at what happens when you set innodb_open_files higher than the open_files_limit.

We can set the maximum number of open files in our MySQL configuration file using:

open_files_limit=10000

If this isn’t set, then the default – which is 5,000 in MySQL 5.7 – should be used.

See Sveta’s excellent blog post for an …

Over the last year, I have been pursuing a part time hobby project exploring ways to squeeze as much data as possible in MySQL. As you will see, there are quite a few different ways. Of course things like compression ratio matters a lot but, other items like performance of inserts, selects and updates, along with the total amount of bytes written are also important. When you start combining all the possibilities, you end up with a large set of compression options and, of course, I am surely missing a ton. This project has been a great learning opportunity and I hope you’ll enjoy reading about my results. Given the volume of results, I’ll have to write a series of posts. This post is the first of the series. I also have to mention that some of my work overlaps work done by one of my colleague, Yura Sorokin, in a …

Very often, database performance is affected by the inability to cache all the required data in memory. Disk IO, even when using the fastest devices, takes much more time than a memory access. With MySQL/InnoDB, the main memory cache is the InnoDB buffer pool. There are many strategies we can try to fit as much data as possible in the buffer pool, and one of them is data compression.

With regular MySQL, to compress InnoDB data you can either use “Barracuda page compression” or “transparent page compression with punch holes”. The use of the ZFS filesystem is another possibility, but it is external to MySQL and doesn’t help with caching. All these solutions are transparent, but often they also have performance and management implications. If you are using Percona Server for MySQL, you have yet another option, “column …