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 …

Percona announces the release of Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.6.35-26.20-3 on April 13, 2017. Binaries are available from the downloads section or our software repositories.

Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.6.35-26.20-3 is now the current release, based on the following:

• Percona Server 5.6.35-81.0
• Galera Replication library 3.20
• wsrep API version 26

All Percona software is open-source and free.

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Percona announces the release of Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.7.17-29.20 on April 19, 2017. Binaries are available from the downloads section or our software repositories.

NOTE: You can also run Docker containers from the images in the Docker Hub repository.

Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.7.17-29.20 is now the current release, based on the following:

• …

Percona announces the release of Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.7.17-27.20 on March 16, 2017. Binaries are available from the downloads section or our software repositories.

NOTE: You can also run Docker containers from the images in the Docker Hub repository.

Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.7.17-27.20 is now the current release, based on the following:

• …

Percona announces the release of Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.6.35-26.20 on March 10, 2017. Binaries are available from the downloads section or our software repositories.

Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.6.35-26.20 is now the current release, based on the following:

• Percona Server 5.6.35-80.0
• Galera Replication library 3.20
• wsrep API version 26

All Percona software is open-source and free. Details of this …

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

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This blog post is my overview of Group Replication technology.

With Oracle clearly entering the “open source high availability solutions” arena with the release of their brand new Group Replication solution, I believe it is time to review the quality of the first GA (production ready) release.

TL;DR: Having examined the technology, it is my conclusion that Oracle seems to have released the GA version of Group Replication too early. While the product is definitely “working prototype” quality, the release seems rushed and unfinished. I found a significant number of issues, and I would personally not recommend it for production use.

It is obvious that Oracle is trying hard to ship technology to compete with …

Welcome to another post in the series of Percona Live featured tutorial speakers blogs! In these blogs, we’ll highlight some of the tutorial speakers that will be at this year’s Percona Live conference. We’ll also discuss how these tutorials can help you improve your database environment. Make sure to read to the end to get a special Percona Live 2017 registration bonus!

In this Percona Live featured tutorial, we’ll meet Frédéric Descamps, MySQL Community Manager at Oracle. Frédéric is probably better known in the community as “LeFred” (Twitter: @lefred)! His tutorial is …

In this blog post, we’ll look at how to set up ProxySQL for high availability.

During the last few months, we’ve had a lot of opportunities to present and discuss a very powerful tool that will become more and more used in the architectures supporting MySQL: ProxySQL.

ProxySQL is becoming more flexible, solid, performant and used every day (http://www.proxysql.com/ and recent http://www.proxysql.com/compare). You can use ProxySQL for high availability.

The tool is a winner when compared to similar ones, and we should all have a clear(er) idea of how to integrate it in our architectures in order to achieve the best results.

The first thing to keep in mind is that ProxySQL doesn’t natively support any high availability solution. We can setup a cluster of …

Join Percona’s Chief Evangelist Colin Charles on Wednesday, January 18, 2017, at 7:00 am (PST) / 10:00 am (EST) (UTC-8) as he presents “Lessons from Database Failures.”

MySQL failures at scale can teach a great deal. MySQL failures can lead to a discussion about such topics as high availability (HA), geographical redundancy and automatic failover. In this webinar, Colin will present case study material (how automatic failover caused Github to go offline, why Facebook uses assisted failover rather than fully automated failover, and other scenarios) to look at how the MySQL world is making things better. One way, for example, is using …