By having appropriate indexes on your MySQL tables, you can greatly enhance the performance of SELECT queries. But, did you know that adding indexes to your tables in itself is an expensive operation, and may take a long time to complete depending on the size of your tables? During this time, you are also likely to experience a degraded performance of queries as your system resources are busy in index-creation work as well. In this blog post, we discuss an approach to optimize the MySQL index creation process in such a way that your regular workload is not impacted.

MySQL Rolling Index Creation

We call this approach a ‘Rolling Index Creation’ - if you have a MySQL master-slave replica set, you can create the index one node at a time in a rolling fashion. You should create the index only on the slave nodes so the master’s …

WordPress is the largest website builder platform in the world, supporting over 34% of all websites on the internet today. MySQL is a free open source relational database management system that is leveraged across a majority of WordPress sites, and allows you to query your data such as posts, pages, images, user profiles, and more. As any WordPress developer knows, each installation requires a database in the backend, and MySQL is the database of choice for storing and retrieving your WordPress data.

In order for your WordPress website to be able to access, store and retrieve the data in your MySQL database, it needs to be hosted online through a cloud computing service. ScaleGrid offers a convenient way to setup and configure MySQL hosting for your …

Following the alpha release announced earlier, Percona announces the release candidate of Percona Server for MySQL 8.0.12-2rc1 on October 31, 2018. Download the latest version from the Percona website or from the Percona Software Repositories.

This release is based on MySQL 8.0.12 and includes all the bug fixes in it. It is a Release Candidate quality release and it is not intended for production. If you want a high quality, Generally Available release, use the current Stable version (the most recent stable release at the time of writing in the 5.7 series is 5.7.23-23).

Percona provides completely open-source and free software.

Installation

As this is a release candidate, installation is performed by enabling the testing repository and installing the software via …

When deciding on your backup strategy, one of the key components for Point In Time Recovery (PITR) will be the binary logs. Thankfully, the mysqlbinlog command allows you to easily take binary log backups, including those that would otherwise be encrypted on disk using encrypt_binlog=ON.

When

mysqlbinlog

  is used with

--raw --read-from-remote-server --stop-never --verify-binlog-checksum

  then it will retrieve binary logs from whichever master it is pointed to, and store …

Alpha Build of Percona Server 8.0 released

An alpha version of Percona Server 8.0 is now available in the Percona experimental software repositories. This is a 64-bit release only. 

You may experiment with this alpha release by running it in a Docker container:

$ docker run -d -e MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=password -p 3306:3306 perconalab/percona-server:8.0.12.alpha

When the container starts, connect to it as follows:

$ docker exec -ti $(docker ps | grep -F percona-server:8.0.12.alpha | awk '{print $1}') mysql -uroot -ppassword

Note that this release is not ready for use in any production environment.

Percona Server 8.0 alpha is available for the following …

In this blog post, we’ll discuss how to set a replication from MySQL 8.0 to MySQL 5.7. There are some situations that having this configuration might help. For example, in the case of a MySQL upgrade, it can be useful to have a master that is using a newer version of MySQL to an older version slave as a rollback plan. Another example is in the case of upgrading a master x master replication topology.

Officially, replication is only supported between consecutive major MySQL versions, and only from a lower version master to a higher version slave. Here is an example of a supported scenario:

5.7 master –> 8.0 slave

while the opposite is not supported:

8.0 master –> 5.7 slave

In this blog post, I’ll walk through how to overcome the …

I recently helped a customer figure out why a minor version MySQL upgrade was indicating that some tables needed to be rebuilt. The mysql_upgrade program should be run for every upgrade, no matter how big or small the version difference is, but when only the minor version changes, I would normally not expect it to require tables to be rebuilt.

Turns out some of their tables were still marked with an older MySQL version, which could mean a few things… most likely that something went wrong with a previous upgrade, or that the tables were copied from a server with an older version.

In cases like this, did you know there is a fast, safe and simple way to check the version associated with a table? You can do this by reading the FRM file, following the format specification found here.

If you look at that page, you’ll see that the …