The latest from the MySQL community

Percona Toolkit 3.7.1 has been released on Dec 17, 2025. The most important updates in this version are:

• Finalized SSL/TLS support for MySQL
• Added support for Debian 13 and Amazon Linux 2023
• Fixed MariaDB support broken in version 3.7.0
• Added options to skip certain collections in pt-k8s-debug-collector and pt-stalk
• Documentation improvements
• Other performance improvements

In this blog, I will outline the most significant changes. A full list of improvements and bug fixes can be found in the release notes.

SSL/TLS support for MySQL

Percona Toolkit historically did not have consistent SSL support. This was reported at …

MySQL replication has been around forever, and yet… people still manage to set it up in ways that break at the worst possible moment. Even in 2025, you can get burned by tiny schema differences, missing primary keys, or one forgotten config flag. I’ve seen replicas drift so far out of sync they might as well live in a different universe.

This guide covers the practical best practices—the stuff real DBAs use every day to keep replication stable, predictable, and boring. (Boring is a compliment in database land.)

Always Use GTIDs. Yes, Always.

GTID-based replication is one of those features that people resist turning on, and then once they do, they never want to go back.

Why GTIDs?

• Failover become sane
• Reparenting replicas stops being a headache
• Missing transactions are easy to detect

Your my.cnf should absolutely include:

Copy Copied!

When I first got into woodworking, my mentor shared a piece of advice that has stuck with me ever since: “Use the right tool for the job.” You wouldn’t reach for a belt sander to flatten a board when a planer can accomplish the task faster, cleaner, and with far better results.

The same principle applies in the world of database engineering. When working with MySQL or Percona Server, choosing the correct tool can be the difference between efficient diagnostics and unnecessary downtime.

In this post, I’ll highlight several of the most practical and commonly used utilities from the Percona Toolkit. While the toolkit includes many powerful commands, I’ll focus on the ones that provide the most value in day-to-day operations, troubleshooting, and gathering actionable details for support cases.

PT Summary

A Percona Toolkit utility that provides a concise, high-level overview of a system’s hardware, OS …

Are you passionate about databases and want to stay on top of the latest advancements in MySQL and Percona Toolkit? You’re in luck! We are excited to invite you to our upcoming online stream, where we’ll delve into some exciting changes and updates.

Date: March 27, 2025
Time: 13:30 GMT / 9:30 ET
Streaming Live on: LinkedIn and YouTube

About the Event

Our featured speaker, Sveta Smirnova, Principal Support Engineering Coordinator at Percona, will share her insights on the recent updates in MySQL, focusing on the removal of offensive replication statements like START/STOP SLAVE. As the maintainer of the Percona Toolkit, Sveta had to rewrite numerous tools and …

Percona Toolkit 3.7.0 has been released on Dec 23, 2024. The main feature of this release is MySQL 8.4 support.

In this blog, I will explain what has been changed. A full list of improvements and bug fixes can be found in the release notes.

TLDR;

• Replication statements in 8.4 are fully supported by the Percona Toolkit
• pt-slave-delay has been deprecated.
• pt-slave-find has been renamed to pt-replica-find. The old name has been deprecated but exists in the repository as an alias of the pt-replica-find.
• pt-slave-restart has been renamed to pt-replica-restart. Old name has been deprecated but exists in the repository as an alias of the …

Percona Toolkit + pt-table-checksum + pt-table-sync = Faster Replica Recovery

Asynchronous replication with MySQL is a tried and true technology. Add the use of GTID’s and you have a very stable solution.

The fundamental issue with async replication is that writes sent to the Replica are not guaranteed to be written. I have only seen a handful of times when writes did not get applied to the replica. Most of the time this happens is due to network packet drops or a replica crashes before new data is committed.

I can remember long nights of restoring backups of the primary to the replica’s. Not a painful process but time consuming.

Please take a few moments to review the full documentation of both tools before trying this example on live data: pt-table-checksum, pt-table-sync.

With …

I am always surprised to learn something new whenever I talk to a member of the open-source community. No matter how much I think I have heard of every use case there is for Liquibase (and database change management in general), I always hear something that makes this space still feel new. There’s always something left to discover.

Today, that new something is the problem of how to perform large batches of changes with SQL ALTER TABLE statements. No problem you say? Okay, but this ALTER needs to happen in production. Still not worried? Well, let’s say you have millions of rows, and because you’re so successful, you have many transactions happening per minute (maybe even per second). Yeah…now we are talking. You can’t alter the table because you can’t afford to lock that table for the …

Modern applications often feature the use of data in many different languages. This is often true even of applications that only offer a user facing interface in a single language. Many users may, for example, need to enter names which, although using Latin characters, feature diacritics; in other cases, they may need to enter text which contains Chinese or Japanese characters. Even if a user is capable of using an application localized for only one language, it may be necessary to deal with data from a wide variety of languages.

Additionally, increased use of mobile phones has lead to changes in communications behaviour; this includes a vastly increased use of standardized characters intended to convey emotions, often called “emojis” or “emoticons.” Originally, such information was conveyed using ASCII text, such as “:-)” to indicate happiness - but, as noted, this has changed, with many devices automatically converting such …

The “sla” in mysqlsla stands for “statement log analyzer”. This does a much better job than mysqldumpslow of analyzing your slow query log. In fact, you can sort by many different parameters — by sheer number of times the query shows up in the slow query log, by the total or average query [...]

Today I’ve been checking out a new client environment. My mission is to figure out (cold) some of the characteristics of the queries being run, and particularly if they’re “good” or “bad”. In my arsenal of “tools I really want to check out” has been Ma’atkit’s Query Profiler. They’re very different tools. Ma’atkit’s query [...]