If you are going to migrate your MySQL workloads to GCP’s managed database service CloudSQL, then you have to keep these points in mind. We have done a lot of CloudSQL migrations. But sometimes it’s not smooth as we thought. Generally, people don’t even think that these thinks will make the replication failure. I listing 3 things that ate our brain and time while migrating to CloudSQL.

1. Server character set:

CloudSQL by default using utf8 as the server character set. But it is customizable, we can change it any time. But still, it’ll mess up your application later. We had a MySQL server on a VM where the server’s character set was latin1. We dump the database and restore it to CloudSQL. While launching the CloudSQL we didn’t set up any Database flags. So the data restore with utf8 character set.

Before Migration

mysql> SHOW SESSION …

If you are going to migrate your MySQL workloads to GCP’s managed database service CloudSQL, then you have to keep these points in mind. We have done a lot of CloudSQL migrations. But sometimes it’s not smooth as we thought. Generally, people don’t even think that these thinks will make the replication failure. I listing 3 things that ate our brain and time while migrating to CloudSQL.

1. Server character set:

CloudSQL by default using utf8 as the server character set. But it is customizable, we can change it any time. But still, it’ll mess up your application later. We had a MySQL server on a VM where the server’s character set was latin1. We dump the database and restore it to CloudSQL. While launching the CloudSQL we didn’t set up any Database flags. So the data restore with utf8 character set.

Before Migration

mysql> SHOW SESSION …

When creating a MySQL CloudSQL instance, SSL connections are not enforced by default and you get below in the Connections tab of the Google Cloud Platform console.  Is this a problem ?  Some people might think no, but I do not agree with them.  And if I am writing this post, you can probably guess that there is a lot to say about this subject.  Read on for the details.

When creating a MySQL

War story of the day: do not use — or be very careful when using — the max_connections beta database flag on CloudSQL... because it has many bugs.

I was hit by this today: we set the max_connections flag to 8000 on a primary server a few days ago, we had a failover last night, and the flag was not set on the replica (bug #1).

Update 2019-05-03: there is another bug (bug #1.5).  If you set 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 …

A colleague brought an article to my attention.  I did not see it on Planet MySQL where I get most of the MySQL news (or it did not catch my eye there).  As it is interesting replication stuff, I think it is important to bring it to the attention of the MySQL Community, so I am writing this short post.

The surprising part for me is that it uses my 4-year-old work for online migration to GTID