The latest from the MySQL community

(based on a conversation with a colleague, and a bit of Twitter)

A Conundrum

A developer colleague paged me with this:

mysql> select
UNIX_TIMESTAMP("2021-03-26 03:07:00" + INTERVAL 2 YEAR) -
UNIX_TIMESTAMP("2021-03-26 02:07:00" + INTERVAL 2 YEAR) as delta\G
delta: 420

It is obviously wrong, and weirdly so. It only works for “2 year”, not with other values:

mysql> select
UNIX_TIMESTAMP("2021-03-26 03:07:00" + INTERVAL 1-11 year_month) -
UNIX_TIMESTAMP("2021-03-26 02:07:00" + INTERVAL 1-11 year_month) as delta\G
delta: 3600

mysql> select
UNIX_TIMESTAMP("2021-03-26 03:07:00" + INTERVAL 1-12 year_month) -
UNIX_TIMESTAMP("2021-03-26 02:07:00" + INTERVAL 1-12 year_month) as delta\G
delta: 3600

mysql> select
UNIX_TIMESTAMP("2021-03-26 03:07:00" + INTERVAL 1-13 year_month) -
UNIX_TIMESTAMP("2021-03-26 02:07:00" + INTERVAL 1-13 …

The tables in PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA (P_S) are not actually tables. You should not think of them as tables, even if your SQL works on them. You should not JOIN them, and you should not GROUP or ORDER BY them.

Unlocked memory buffers without indexes

The stuff in P_S has been created with “keep the impact on production small” in mind. That is, from a users point of view, you can think of them as unlocked memory buffers – the values in there change as you look at them, and there are precisely zero stability guarantees.

There are also no indexes.

Unstable comparisons

When sorting a table for a GROUP BY or ORDER BY, it may be necessary to compare the value of one row to other rows multiple times in order to determine where the row goes. The value compared to other rows can change while this happens, and will change more often the more load the server has. The end …

The tables in PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA (P_S) are not actually tables. You should not think of them as tables, even if your SQL works on them. You should not JOIN them, and you should not GROUP or ORDER BY them.

Unlocked memory buffers without indexes

The stuff in P_S has been created with “keep the impact on production small” in mind. That is, from a users point of view, you can think of them as unlocked memory buffers - the values in there change as you look at them, and there are precisely zero stability guarantees. There are also no indexes.

Unstable comparisons

When sorting a table for a GROUP BY or ORDER BY, it may be necessary to compare the value of one row to other rows multiple times in order to determine where the row goes. The value compared to other rows can change while this happens, and will change more often the more load the server has. The end result is …

At work, I am in an ongoing discussion with a number of people on the Observability of Outliers. It started with the age-old question “How do I find slow queries in my application?” aka “What would I want from tooling to get that data and where should that tooling sit?”

As a developer, I just want to automatically identify and isolate slow queries!

Where I work, we do have SolarWinds Database Performance Monitor aka Vividcortex to find slow queries, so that helps. But that collects data at the database, which means you get to see slow queries, but maybe not application context.

There is also work done by a few developers which instead collects query strings, query execution times and query counts at the application. This has access to the call stack, so it can tell you which code generated the query that was slow.

It …

At work, I am in an ongoing discussion with a number of people on the Observability of Outliers. It started with the age-old question “How do I find slow queries in my application?” aka “What would I want from tooling to get that data and where should that tooling sit?”

As a developer, I just want to automatically identify and isolate slow queries!

Where I work, we do have SolarWinds Database Performance Monitor aka Vividcortex to find slow queries, so that helps. But that collects data at the database, which means you get to see slow queries, but maybe not application context. There is also work done by a few developers which instead collects query strings, query execution times and query counts at the application. This has access to the call stack, so it can tell you which code generated the query that was slow. It also channels this …

Incorporating a database in an organization is a complicated task that involves a lot of people besides the DBAs. This is something that Peter Zaitsev, co-founder and CEO of Percona, understands very well.

In the build-up to his hands-on presentation with the open source Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) platform, Peter spoke about how inducting a database in an organization is a constant tussle between the developers, the management and the DBAs. While the developers want a solution that just works, the managers don’t want the database to break the bank: “The DBAs just want to make sure they don’t spend too much time keeping them both happy,” he shared.

This is why, Peter argues, DBAs want to make sure the databases in their realm are optimized for performance. Like security, performance optimization is an …

We are proud to announce that Percona was selected as a participating organization for the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2020 program, this is our second year as a participating org with the GSoC program.

GSoC is a great program to involve young student developers in open source projects. We participated in the program in 2019 for the first time and we were really happy and satisfied with the results.
Percona Platform Engineering team decided to participate again for the 2020 program and we are glad and really happy to inform you that we were selected and welcome the student to work with our team during the summer of 2020 on their GSoC Project.

Preparations

We started planning for GSoC around November-December 2019, with the help from our Product Management team, we were able to shortlist a few ideas which we thought were really the right fit for …

We are proud to announce that Percona was selected as a participating organization for the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2020 program, this is our second year as a participating org with the GSoC program.

GSoC is a great program to involve young student developers in open source projects. We participated in the program in 2019 for the first time and we were really happy and satisfied with the results. Percona Platform Engineering team decided to participate again for the 2020 program and we are glad and really happy to inform you that we were selected and welcome the student to work with our team during the summer of 2020 on their GSoC Project.

Preparations

We started planning for GSoC around November-December 2019, with the help from our Product Management team, we were able to shortlist a few ideas which we thought were really the right fit for our …

This session at Percona Live ONLINE was presented by Akshay Suryawanshi, Senior Production Engineer at Shopify, and Jeremy Cole, Senior Staff Production Engineer – Datastores at Shopify.

Shopify is an online and on-premise commerce platform, founded in 2006. Shopify is used by more than a million merchants, and hundreds of billions of dollars of sales have happened on the platform since its inception. The company is a large user of MySQL, and the Black Friday and Cyber Monday weekends are their peak dates during the year, handling hundreds of billions of queries with MySQL. This year’s presentation was an opportunity to talk about the company’s challenges and progress over the last twelve months.

Key Google Cloud concepts from the presentation

As part of the presentation, it’s important to understand the naming conventions that exist around …

This session at Percona Live ONLINE was presented by Akshay Suryawanshi, Senior Production Engineer at Shopify, and Jeremy Cole, Senior Staff Production Engineer - Datastores at Shopify. Shopify is an online and on-premise commerce platform, founded in 2006.

Shopify is used by more than a million merchants, and hundreds of billions of dollars of sales have happened on the platform since its inception. The company is a large user of MySQL, and the Black Friday and Cyber Monday weekends are their peak dates during the year, handling hundreds of billions of queries with MySQL. This year’s presentation was an opportunity to talk about the company’s challenges and progress over the last twelve months.

Key Google Cloud concepts from the presentation

As part of the presentation, it’s important to understand the naming conventions that exist around …