Welcome to the second day of the Percona Live Open Source Database Conference 2017, and the second set of Percona Live keynotes! It’s a bit rainy outside today, but that isn’t bothering the Percona Live attendees (we’re all indoors learning about new open source technologies)!

Day two of the conference kicked off with another four keynote talks, all of which discussed issues and technologies that are addressed by open source solutions:

The Open Source Database Business Model is Under Siege

Paul Dix (InfluxData)

Paul Dix’s keynote may have ruffled a few feathers, as he looked at possible futures for the open …

In this blog, we’ll look at how to achieve better-than-linear scaling.

Scalability is the capability of a system, network or process to handle a growing amount of work, or its potential to be enlarged to accommodate that growth. For example, we consider a system scalable if it is capable of increasing its total output under an increased load when resources (typically hardware) are added: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalability.

It is often accepted as a fact that systems (in particular databases) can’t scale better than linearly. By this I mean when you double resources, the expected performance doubles, at best (and often is less than doubled).  

We can attribute this assumption to Amdahl’s law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law), and later …

In this blog, we’ll look at how to resolve MySQL error code 1215: “Cannot add foreign key constraint”.

Our Support customers often come to us with things like “My database deployment fails with error 1215”, “Am trying to create a foreign key and can’t get it working” or “Why am I unable to create a constraint?” To be honest, the error message doesn’t help much. You just get the following line:

ERROR 1215 (HY000): Cannot add foreign key constraint

But MySQL never tells you exactly WHY it failed. There’s actually a multitude of reasons this can happen. This blog post is a compendium of the most common reasons why you can get ERROR 1215, how to diagnose your case to find which one is affecting you and potential solutions for adding the foreign key.

In honor of the upcoming MariaDB M17 conference in New York City on April 11-12, we have enhanced Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) Metrics Monitor with a new MariaDB Dashboard and multiple new graphs!

The Percona Monitoring and Management MariaDB Dashboard builds on the efforts of the MariaDB development team to instrument the Aria Storage Engine Status Variables related to Aria Pagecache and Aria Transaction Log activity, the tracking of Index Condition Pushdown (ICP), InnoDB Online DDL when using ALTER TABLE ... ALGORITHM=INPLACE, InnoDB Deadlocks …

In this blog post, we’ll look at how “operator error” can cause serious problems (like the one we saw last week with AWS), and how to avoid them in MySQL using

--i-am-a-dummy

.

Recently, AWS had some serious downtime in their East region, which they explained as the consequence of a bad deployment. It seems like most of the Internet was affected in one way or another. Some on Twitter dubbed it “S3 Dependency Awareness Day.”

Since the outage, many companies (especially Amazon!) are reviewing their production access and deployment procedures. It would be a lie if I claimed I’ve never made a mistake in production. In fact, I would be afraid of working with someone who claims to have never made a mistake in a production environment.

Making a mistake or two is how you learn to have a full …

UPDATE: Some of the language in the original post was considered overly-critical of Oracle by some community members. This was not my intent, and I’ve modified the language to be less so. I’ve also changed term “synchronous” (which the use of is inaccurate and misleading) to “virtually synchronous.” This term is more accurate and already used by both technologies’ founders, and should be less misleading.

I also wanted to thank Jean-François Gagné for pointing out the incorrect sentence about multi-threaded slaves in Group Replication, which I also corrected accordingly.

In today’s blog post, I will briefly compare two major virtually synchronous replication technologies available today for MySQL.

More Than Asynchronous Replication

…

In this blog, we’ll discuss how to use concurrency to help with WAN latency when using synchronous clusters.

WAN Latency Problem

Our customers often ask us for help or advice with WAN clustering problems. Historically, the usual solution for MySQL WAN deployments is having the primary site in one data center, and stand-by backup site in another data center (replicating from the primary asynchronously). These days, however, there is a huge desire to employ available synchronous replication solutions for MySQL. These solutions include things like Galera (i.e., Percona XtraDB Cluster) or the recently released MySQL Group Replication. This trend is attributable to the fact that these solutions are less problematic and provide more automatic fail over and fail back procedures. But it’s also because businesses want to write in both data centers simultaneously.

Unfortunately, WAN link reliability and latency makes …

In this blog, we’ll look at how to manually build Percona Server for MySQL RPM packages.

Several customers and other people from the open source community have asked us how they could make their own Percona Server for MySQL RPM binaries from scratch.

This request is often made by companies that want to add custom patches to our release. To do this, you need to make some modifications to the

percona-server.spec

 file in the source tree, and some preparation is necessary.

This post covers how you can make your own RPMs from GIT or source tarball so that you can build RPMs from your own modified branch, or by applying patches. In this example, we’ll build Percona Server 5.7.16-10.

Making your own RPMs is not a recommended practice, and should rarely be …

This blog discusses how to prepare your database for the new leap second coming in the new year.

At the end of this year, on December 31, 2016, a new leap second gets added. Many of us remember the huge problems this caused back in 2012. Some of our customers asked how they should prepare for this year’s event to avoid any unexpected problems.

It’s a little late, but I thought discussing the issue might still be useful.

The first thing is to make sure your systems avoid the issue with abnormally high CPU usage. This was an problem in 2012 due to a Linux kernel bug. After the leap second was added, CPU utilization sky-rocketed on many systems, taking down …

Using Vault with MySQL

In my previous post I discussed using GPG to secure your database credentials. This relies on a local copy of your MySQL client config, but what if you want to keep the credentials stored safely along with other super secret information? Sure, GPG could still be used, but there must be an easier way to do this.

This post will look at a way to use Vault to store your credentials in a central location and use them to access your database. For those of you that have not yet come across Vault, it is a great way to manage your secrets – securing, storing and tightly controlling access. It has the added benefits of being able to handle leasing, key revocation, key rolling and auditing.

During this blog post we’ll accomplish the following …