The latest from the MySQL community

Posted on MySQL Ninjas | August 2026

Every DBA has been there. An alert fires. You SSH into the box, run free -h, and see MySQL consuming far more RAM than you configured. You double-check innodb_buffer_pool_size. It's set correctly. So where is the memory going?

This is the story of debugging exactly that — on a Google Cloud c4d-standard-4 instance with 14.7 GB RAM, MySQL configured with a 7168 MB buffer pool, and mysqld RSS sitting at 10.4 GB. That's a 3.2 GB gap nobody could explain.

The Setup

We run a large …

Release of RonDB 21.04.0

RonDB is based on MySQL NDB Cluster optimised for use in modern cloud settings. Today we launch RonDB 21.04.0. In RonDB 21.04.0 we have integrated benchmark scripts to execute various benchmarks towards RonDB.

There are three ways of using RonDB. The first is using the managed version provided by Logical Clocks. This is currently available in AWS and is currently being developed to also support Azure. This is still in limited access mode. To access it contact Logical Clocks at the rondb.com website.

The second way is to use a script provided by Logical Clocks that automates the creation of VMs and the installation of the software components required by RonDB. These scripts are available to create RonDB clusters on Azure and GCP (Google Cloud). This script can be downloaded from nexus.hops.works/rondb-cloud-installer.sh.

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 …

TL;DR — If you are hosting your database server in GCE, then you have to be very cautious with capacity planning. The number of CPU cores has an impact on IOPS you get. Even if your workload is not CPU intensive, you might want to provision enough depending on the kind of IOPS you are going to need. For more details, read through one of the problems we faced and the RCA.

Problem statement:

We had a master-slave setup for one of the MySQL database servers. The MySQL server’s performance was good, we didn’t notice any performance related issues initially. But we recently noticed replication lag on the slave. and we figured out that the slave thread was very slow.

Server’s Capacity:

Both our master-slave servers are of the same size.

• 4 Core CPU
• 16GB Memory
• 2 databases are hosted
• 20GB is the database size.
…

This is a follow-up post in the MySQL Master Replication Crash Safety series.  In the previous posts, we explored the consequences of reducing durability on masters (different data inconsistencies after an OS crash depending on replication type) and the performance boost associated with this configuration (benchmark results done on Google Cloud Platform / GCP).  The consequences are summarised in

This post is a sister post to MySQL Master Replication Crash Safety Part #5: making things faster without reducing durability.  There is no introduction or conclusion to this post, only landing sections: reading this post without its context is not not recommended. You should start with the main post and come back here for more details.

And this Part #5 of the series has many sub-parts.  So far,

This is a follow-up post in the MySQL Master Replication Crash Safety series.  In the three previous posts, we explored the consequence of reducing durability on masters (including setting sync_binlog to a value different from 1).  But so far, I only quickly presented why a DBA would run MySQL with such configuration.  In this post, I present actual benchmark results.  I also present a

This post is a sister post to MySQL Master Replication Crash Safety Part #4: benchmarks of high and low durability.  There are no introduction or conclusion to this post, only landing sections: reading this post without its context is not recommended. You should start with the main post and come back here for more details.

Environment

My benchmark environment is composed of three vms in

Ready to transition from a commercial database to open source, and want to know which databases are most popular in 2019? Wondering whether an on-premise vs. public cloud vs. hybrid cloud infrastructure is best for your database strategy? Or, considering adding a new database to your application and want to see which combinations are most popular? We found all the answers you need at the Percona Live event last month, and broke down the insights into the following free trends reports:

• Top Databases Used: Open Source vs. Commercial
• Cloud Infrastructure Analysis: Public Cloud vs. On-Premise vs. Hybrid Cloud
• Polyglot Persistence Trends: …