The requirements for managing and running a database in a modern enterprise have evolved over the past ten years. Those in charge of running enterprise databases have seen their focus shift from ensuring access and availability, to architecture, design and scalability responsibilities. Web-first companies pioneered the change by charging site reliability engineers (SRE’s) or multi-faceted DBAs with the task of ensuring that the company’s main revenue engine not only stayed up, but could scale to wherever the business needed to go. This is a far cry from the classic enterprise DBA’s top responsibilities: keep it up, keep it backed up, and react to issues as they present themselves.

Today, enterprises look for new revenue models to keep up with a shifting technology paradigm driven by the cloud. The requirements and needs for managing their database environments are changing along with this shift. In the SaaS world, application outages …

A number of new JSON functions have been added to MySQL 8.0. Since we appreciate that not everyone will be ready to upgrade to MySQL 8.0 the minute it is released, we have backported many of the new functions to MySQL 5.7 so that they are available starting with version 5.7.22.…

One of the highlights of Percona Live is that the winners of the annual MySQL Community Awards are announced. A 100% community effort, the awards were created to recognize community contribution. This year saw six very deserving winners in three categories:

MySQL Community Awards: Community Contributor of the year 2018

Two individuals received these awards:

• Jean-François Gagné
  Jean-François was nominated for his many blog posts, bug reports, and experiment results that make MySQL much better. His blog: https://jfg-mysql.blogspot.com/
• Sveta Smirnova
  Sveta spreads knowledge and good practice on all things MySQL as a frequent speaker and blogger. Her years of experience in testing, support, and consulting are shared in webinars, technical posts, conferences around the world …

The world is moving to UTF8, MySQL 8.0 has utf8mb4 charset as default now, but, to be honest, I was pretty surprised how sensible the "charset" related topic could be.. -- in fact you may easily hit huge performance overhead just by using an "odd" config settings around your client/server charset and collation. While to avoid any potential charset mismatch between client and server, MySQL has from a long time an excellent option : "skip-character-set-client-handshake" which is forcing any client connection to be "aligned" with server settings ! (for more details see the ref. manual : https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/server-options.html#option_mysqld_character-set-client-handshake) -- this option is NOT set by default (to leave you a freedom in choose of charsets used on client and server sides). However, in my …

We’re moving along at Percona Live 2018, and there are still packed and energetic talks after lunch.

My next session was with Andrew Regner, Production Engineer at Facebook. His talk was on securing access to Facebook’s databases.

Since the beginning, Facebook has used a conventional username/password to secure access to production MySQL instances. Over the last few years, they’ve been working on moving to x509 TLS client certificate authenticated connections. Given the many types of languages and systems at Facebook that use MySQL in some way, this required a massive amount of changes for a lot of teams.

This talk is both a technical overview of how their new solution works and hard-learned tricks for getting an entire company to change their underlying MySQL client libraries.

After his talk, …

Percona Live 2018 is moving along, and the first person I got a chance to talk with is Michael Demmer, Senior Staff Engineer at Slack. His talk was on Migrating to Vitess at (Slack Scale).

MySQL is the backbone of Slack’s data storage infrastructure. It handles billions of queries per day across thousands of sharded database hosts. Slack is migrating this system to use Vitess’ flexible sharding and topology management instead of simple application-based shard routing and manual administration. This effort aims to provide an architecture that scales to meet the growing demands of our largest customers and features while under pressure to maintain a stable and performant service.

This talk presented the core motivations behind our decision, why Vitess won out as the best option, and how Slack laid the groundwork for the …

Oracle MySQL 8.0 has been declared GA but a critical piece is missing … MySQL 8 is a fantastic release embedding the work of brilliant Oracle engineering. I will not detail all the great features of MySQL 8 as there are a lot of great presentations around it. https://mysqlserverteam.com/whats-new-in-mysql-8-0-generally-available/

One of my main concern regarding [...]

Query profiling is a useful technique for analyzing the overall performance of a database. Considering that a single mid-to-large sized application can execute numerous queries each and every second, query profiling is an important part of database tuning, both as a proactive measure and in diagnosing problems.  In fact, it can become difficult to determine the exact sources and causes of bottlenecks and sluggish performance without employing some sort of query profiling techniques. This blog will present a few useful query profiling techniques that exploit MariaDB server’s own built-in tools: the Slow Query Log and the Performance Schema.

MariaDB vs. MySQL

Needless to say, the techniques that we’ll be covering here today are likely to be equally applicable to MySQL, due to the close relationship between the two products.

The day that Oracle announced the purchase of Sun back in 2010, Michael “Monty” Widenius …

In this blog post on Percona Live 2018 sessions, we’ll talk with Shuhoa Wu, Software Developer for Shopify, Inc. about how Ghostferry is the Swiss Army knife of live data migrations.

Existing tools like mysqldump and replication cannot migrate data between GTID-enabled MySQL and non-GTID-enabled MySQL – a common configuration across multiple cloud providers that cannot be changed. These tools are also cumbersome to operate and error-prone, thus requiring a DBA’s attention for each data migration. Shopify’s team introduced a tool that allows for easy migration of data between MySQL databases with constant downtime on the order of seconds.

Inspired by gh-ost, their tool is named Ghostferry and allows application developers at Shopify to migrate data without assistance …

In this blog post on Percona Live 2018 sessions, we’ll talk with Jun Su, Principal Engineering Manager at Microsoft about how Microsoft built MySQL, PostgreSQL and MariaDB for the cloud.

Offering MySQL, PostgreSQL and MariaDB database services in the cloud is different than doing so on-premise. Latency, connection redirection, optimal performance configuration are just a few challenges. In this session, Jun Su walked us through Microsoft’s journey to not only offer these popular OSS RDBMS in Microsoft Azure, but how they are implemented in Azure as a true DBaaS. We learned about Microsoft’s Azure Database Services platform architecture, and how these services are built to scale.

In Azure, database engine instances are services managed by the Azure Service Fabric, which is a platform for …