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Have you ever run into a mysqld process that has been starting for a long time and still won’t come up? When that happens, you can use perf top to check what the MySQL process is mainly doing. If what you see looks like the figure below — the MySQL main thread (the one starting from mysqld_main) spending the vast majority of its time rolling back transactions — then you are very likely hitting a large-transaction rollback.

The most common way to get here is a large transaction that fills up the disk while writing its binlog, crashing the instance. The largest binlog file I have run into was over 114GB. Since the Binlog Cache’s …

Henrik IngoMySQL Community Architect In May we hosted the first MySQL Contributor Summit 2026. We arrange such Summits every quarter, and it’s a forum where contributors come together and make proposals, and then discuss them, on what they wish to work on, or see someone else work on, in future MySQL versions.  All of the presentations are now […]

The MySQL Community team will continue to be active across conferences, user group meetups, open source events, and regional community activities throughout August, September, and October 2026.  While some of our August events were featured in our previous event update, we’ve included them here again with the latest information. Whether you’re interested in learning about MySQL 9.7 LTS, exploring the latest features in […]

The July 2026 MySQL releases are now available, including: MySQL 26.7.0 is the first generally available Innovation release following MySQL 9.7 LTS and the first MySQL release to use the new calendar-versioning model. MySQL 9.7.2 and MySQL 8.4.11 continue the quarterly maintenance cadence for the current MySQL Long-Term Support release lines. A new calendar-versioning model […]

1. What it is about

This investigation began as a performance comparison for different memory allocators. However, during benchmarking, I discovered unexpected effects deserving a more detailed explanation. I hope you find these findings both interesting and useful.

Imagine you need to set up a MySQL database server. Every detail is planned: the operating system, the CPU architecture, the number of cores, the amount of RAM, the storage capacity and speed. On paper the hardware looks like it can handle the workload. But in reality, things rarely go exactly as planned. So, conducting a thorough stress test is the next thing to do.

2. Realities of stress testing

You configure your MySQL server setting the innodb_buffer_pool_size to 70-80% of your available RAM. This creates a large fast buffer for your data and indexes, reducing the need for slower disk input/output.

After …

The fifth MySQL Public Discussion as part of our Community Engagement plan. The plan includes accelerating innovation in MySQL Community Edition, increasing community contributions and expanding the MySQL ecosystem overall. This session was focused on the contributor experience and the ongoing work to make contributing to MySQL more transparent and accessible. The session covered MySQL […]

You've probably all experienced it; another outage and the database is the root cause.  Why are databases such a frequent cause of problems in most tech stacks? Why can't we seem to solve these problems industry-wide?  Are database engineers and database admins just bad at their jobs?

Over my career as a database reliability engineer, I've come to a conclusion which I don't see repeated often:

All practical implementations have to balance the opposing concerns of correctness vs. performance & availability (this is kind of similar to CAP theorem , but not exactly the same).   Perfect correctness with no data loss across geographic distances would result in a database which is too slow or too costly to be useful for most applications. And these constraints cannot be overcome because it's the physical bounds of reality which imposes …

Overview OpenSSL 3.5 integrates a number of algorithms resistant to attack by future quantum computers, commonly referred as Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC). These include: Possibility of storing the vast amounts of TLS encrypted traffic now and decrypting it later once the quantum computers become capable enough is considered a real problem, so the governments and standards […]

“Through transparent roadmaps, community-driven collaboration, contributor programs, and the MySQL Governance model, we aim to create an environment where innovation can accelerate while preserving the reliability, compatibility, security, and operational excellence that organizations around the world depend on.”

Q1. Oracle has announced a “new era” of MySQL community engagement at MySQL’s 30th anniversary. Can you walk us through what specifically prompted this strategic shift, and what concrete changes can the community expect to see in how Oracle approaches MySQL development and governance?

HVC: Throughout 2025 we celebrated 30 years of MySQL and reflected on the past and present, but more importantly, the future. The MySQL Community team sought feedback from around the globe on how to lead the next generation of MySQL innovation and open source collaboration. We came to Jason …

With the release of MySQL 9.7 Community Edition, the Hypergraph Optimizer is now available to everyone. This is a significant addition to MySQL and one that has generated a lot of excitement in the MySQL community. The promise is simple: better execution plans for complex queries, especially those with many joins. Like most new features, […]