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

Has a week passed already? Welcome back to the second column. A lot of time has been spent neck deep in getting speakers accepted and scheduled for Percona Live Open Source Database Conference Europe 2017 in Dublin, as well organizing the conference sponsors.

Percona Live Europe Dublin

At the time of writing, we are six weeks away from the conference, so a little over a month! Have you registered yet? …

Upstream platform vendors have announced the general end of life (EOL) for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (RHEL 5) and its derivatives, as well as Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. With this announcement comes some implications to support for Percona software running on these operating systems.

RHEL 5 was EOL as of March 31st, 2017 and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS was end of life as of April 28th, 2017. Pursuant to our end of life policies, we are announcing that these EOLs will go into effect for Percona software on August 1st, 2017. As of this date, we will no longer be producing new packages, binary builds, hotfixes, or bug fixes for Percona software on these platforms.

We …

So far in this series I had written only/mostly about MySQL server bugs. Does it mean that there are no unique or interesting bugs in other MySQL-related software or MySQL forks and projects that use MySQL code?

Surely no, it doesn't. So, today I'd like to present a short list of currently active (that is, new or probably not yet resolved) bugs that I had reported for Percona's software at Launchpad over the years I use it. The list is based on this link, but I excluded minor reports and those that probably are just forgotten, while the problem is fixed long time ago.

Let me start with bugs in XtraBackup, the tool that plays a key role in most MySQL environments that are not using Oracle's Enterprise …

In this blog post, I will run a gh-ost benchmark against the performance of pt-online-schema-change.

When gh-ost came out, I was very excited. As MySQL ROW replication became commonplace, you could use it to track changes instead of triggers. This practice is cleaner and safer compared to Percona Toolkit’s pt-online-schema-change. Since gh-ost doesn’t need triggers, I assumed it would generate lower overhead and work faster. I frequently called it “pt-online-schema-change on steroids” in my talks. …

This week in Support was busy enough for me. Among other things I had to study all possible reasons (other than obvious query cache impact) for queries hanging in "query end" status and noted Bug #80652 related to binlog group commit and fixed in MySQL 5.7.17+ and 8.0.1+ only. The case I had to review was related to Galera though, and I suggest you to note that "query end" may be related to Galera replication stall. Studying this path further soon brought lp:1197771 - "Cluster stalls while distributing transaction" to my attention again, so I asked about proper status for it on Facebook. As it happens way too often recently, I've got few 'Likes" but no further comments, neither …

In this blog, we’ll look at ClickHouse on its one year anniversary.

It’s been a year already since the Yandex team released ClickHouse as open source software. I’ve had an interest in this project from the very start, as I didn’t think there was an open source analytical database that could compete with industry leaders like Vertica (for example).

This was an exciting year for ClickHouse early adopters. Let’s look at what it accomplished so far.

ClickHouse initially generated interest due to the Yandex name – the most popular search engine in Russia. It wasn’t long before jaw-dropping responses popped up: guys, this thing is crazy fast! Many early adopters who tried ClickHouse were really impressed.

Fast doesn’t mean convenient …

Previous post in series was published almost 4 months ago, but I do not plan to end it. So, let me quickly discuss some of problems I worked on or was interested in so far in June, and provide some useful links.

Back on June 2 I had to find out what exact files are created by MariaDB's ColumnStore when I create a table in this storage engine. Actually in recent versions one can check the tables in the INFORMATION_SCHEMA, but if still wonders why are all these directories with numbers in the names (/usr/local/mariadb/columnstore/data1/000.dir/000.dir/011.dir/193.dir/000.dir/FILE000.cdf), please, check also this …

In this first of a series of blog posts, we’ll look at MySQL encryption at rest.

At Percona, we work with a number of clients that require strong security measures for PCI, HIPAA and PHI compliance, where data managed by MySQL needs to be encrypted “at rest.” As with all things open source, there several options for meeting the MySQL encryption at rest requirement. In this three-part series, we cover several popular options of encrypting data and present the various pros and cons to each solution. You may want to evaluate which parts of these tutorials work best for your situation before using them in production.

Part one of this series is implementing disk-level encryption using crypt+LUKS.

In MySQL 5.7, InnoDB has built-in encryption features. This solution has some cons, …

Join Percona’s CEO and Founder Peter Zaitsev as he presents MySQL In the Cloud: Migration, Best Practices, High Availability, Scaling on Wednesday, June 7, 2017, at 10 am PDT / 1:00 pm EDT (UTC-7).

Register Now

Businesses are moving many of the systems and processes they once owned to offsite “service” models: Platform as a Service (PaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), etc. These services are usually referred to as being “in the cloud” – meaning that the infrastructure and management of the service in …

I will be at several events in June 2017:

• db tech showcase 2017 – 16-17 June 2017 – Tokyo, Japan. I’m giving a talk about best practices around MySQL High Availability.
• O’Reilly Velocity 2017 – 19-22 June 2017 – San Jose, California, USA. I’m giving a tutorial about best practices around MySQL High Availability. Use code CC20 for a 20% discount.

I look forward to meeting with you at either of these events, to discuss all things MySQL (High Availability, security, cloud, etc.), and how Percona can help you.

As I write this, I’m in Budva, Montenegro, for the Percona engineering meeting.