There are three different ways ProxySQL can direct traffic between your application and the backend MySQL services.

1. Locally, on the MySQL servers.
2. Between the MySQL servers and the application.
3. Colocated on the application servers themselves.

Without going through too much detail – each has its own limitations. In the first form, the application needs to know about all MySQL servers at any given point in time. With the third form, a large number of application servers, especially in the age of Kubernetes, where apps can simply recycle easily or be scaled up and down, backend connections can increase exponentially leading to issues.

In the second form, load balancing between a pool of ProxySQL servers is normally the challenge. Do you load balance the load balancers? While there are approaches like balancing from the application, similar to how the MongoDB drivers works, the …

Click Here to Complete our New Survey!

Last year we informally surveyed the open source community and our conference attendees.
The results revealed that:

• 48% of those in the cloud choose to self-manage their databases, but 52% were comfortable relying on the DBaaS offering of their cloud vendor.
• 49% of people said “performance issues” when asked, “what keeps you up at night?”
• The major decision influence for buying services was price, with 42% of respondents keen to make the most of their money.

We found this information so interesting that we wanted to find out more! As a result, we are pleased to announce the launch of our first annual Open Source Data Management Software Survey.

The final results will be 100% anonymous, and will be made freely available on Creative Commons. …

Join Percona CEO Peter Zaitsev as he presents High Availability and Disaster Recovery in Amazon RDS on Wednesday, March 6th, 2019, at 11:00 AM PST (UTC-8) / 2:00 PM EST (UTC-5).

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In this hour-long webinar, Peter describes the differences between high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR). Afterward, Peter will go through scenarios detailing how each is handled manually and in Amazon RDS.

He will review the pros and cons of managing HA and DR in the traditional …

It’s a few weeks after AWS re:Invent 2018 and my head is still spinning from all of the information released at this year’s conference. This year I was able to enjoy a few sessions focused on Aurora deep dives. In fact, I walked away from the conference realizing that my own understanding of High Availability (HA), Disaster Recovery (DR), and Durability in Aurora had been off for quite a while. Consequently, I decided to put this blog out there, both to collect the ideas in one place for myself, and to share them in general. Unlike some of our previous blogs, I’m not focused on analyzing Aurora performance or examining the architecture behind Aurora. Instead, I want to focus on how HA, DR, and Durability are defined and implemented within the Aurora ecosystem.  We’ll get just deep enough into the weeds to be able to examine these capabilities alone.

Aurora MySQL – What is it?

We’ll start with a simplified …

Migrating to Amazon Aurora. Shutterstock.com

In this Checklist for Success series, we will discuss reducing unknowns when hosting in the cloud using and migrating to Amazon Aurora. These tips might also apply to other database as a service (DBaaS) offerings.

While DBaaS encapsulates a lot of the moving pieces, it also means relying on this approach for your long-term stability. This encapsulation is a two-edged sword that takes away your visibility into performance outside of the service layer.

Shine a Light on Bad Queries

Bad queries are one of the top offenders of downtime. Aurora doesn’t protect you against them. Performing a query review as part of a routine health check of your workload helps ensure that you do not miss looming issues. It also helps you predict the …

Recently, I’ve been working with a customer to evaluate the different cloud solutions for MySQL. In this post I am going to focus on maintenance windows and requirements, and what the different cloud platforms offer.

Why is this important at all?

Maintenance windows are required so that the cloud provider can do the necessary updates, patches, and changes to our setup. But there are many questions like:

• Is this going to impact our production traffic?
• Is this going to cause any downtime?
• How long does it take?
• Any way to avoid it?

Let’s discuss the three most popular cloud provider: AWS, Google, Microsoft. These three each have a MySQL based database service where we can compare the maintenance settings.

AWS

When you create an instance you can define your maintenance window. It’s a 30 minutes block when AWS can update and restart …

Is increasing GP2 volumes size or increasing IOPS for IO1 volumes a valid method for scaling IO-Bound workloads? In this post I’ll focus on one question: how much can we improve performance if we use faster cloud volumes? This post is a continuance of previous cloud research posts:

• Saving With MyRocks in The Cloud
• Percona XtraDB Cluster on Amazon GP2 Volumes

To recap, in Amazon EC2 we can use gp2 and io1 volumes. gp2 performance can be scaled with size, i.e for gp2 volume size of 500GB we get 1500 iops; size 1000GB – 3000 iops; and for 3334GB – 10000 iops (maximal …

Please join Percona’s Chief Evangelist, Colin Charles on Wednesday, August 29th, 2018, as he presents Databases in the Hosted Cloud at 7:00 AM PDT (UTC-7) / 10:00 AM EDT (UTC-4).

Register Now

Nearly everyone today uses some form of database in the hosted cloud. You can use hosted MySQL, MariaDB, Percona Server, and PostgreSQL in several cloud providers as a database as a service (DBaaS).

In this webinar, Colin Charles explores how to efficiently deploy a cloud database configured for optimal performance, with a particular focus on MySQL.

You’ll learn the differences between the various public cloud offerings for Amazon RDS including Aurora, Google Cloud SQL, Rackspace OpenStack …

Join Percona Chief Evangelist Colin Charles as he covers happenings, gives pointers and provides musings on the open source database community.

Grading is underway for talks at Percona Live Europe 2018. I understand that by next week you will see the tutorial schedule released. As part of the program committee, I have enjoyed reviewing tutorials, and I reckon there is great competition for the schedule. I suggest you register now, and don’t forget to book your accommodation (need a discount?).

A video worth watching: …

If you are using large EBS GP2 volumes for MySQL (i.e. 10TB+) on AWS EC2, you can increase performance and save a significant amount of money by moving to local SSD (NVMe) instance storage. Interested? Then read on for a more detailed examination of how to achieve cost-benefits and increase performance from this implementation.

EBS vs Local instance store

We have heard from customers that large EBS GP2 volumes can be affected by short term outages—IO “stalls” where no IO is going in or out for a couple of minutes. Statistically, with so many disks in disk arrays (which back EBS volumes) we can expect frequent disk failures. If we allocate a very large EBS GP2 volume, i.e. 10Tb+, hitting such failure events can be common.

In the case of MySQL/InnoDB, such an IO “stall” will be obvious, particularly with the highly loaded system where MySQL needs to do physical IO. During the stall, you will see all write queries …