In the context of providing managed WordPress hosting services, at Presslabs we operate with lots of small to medium-sized databases, in a DB-per-service model, as we call it. The workloads are mostly reads, so we need to efficiently scale that. The MySQL® asynchronous replication model fits the bill very well, allowing us to scale horizontally from one server—with the obvious availability pitfalls—to tens of nodes. The next release of the stack is going to be open-sourced.

As we were already using Kubernetes, we were looking for an operator that could automate our DB deployments and auto-scaling. Those available were doing synchronous replication using MySQL group replication or Galera-based replication. Therefore, we decided to write our own operator.

Solution architecture

The …

Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) is a free and open-source platform for managing and monitoring MySQL® and MongoDB® performance. You can run PMM in your own environment for maximum security and reliability. It provides thorough time-based analysis for MySQL® and MongoDB® servers to ensure that your data works as efficiently as possible.

This release offers two new features for both the MySQL Community and Percona Customers:

• MySQL Custom Queries – Turn a SELECT into a dashboard!
• Server and Client logs – Collect troubleshooting logs for Percona Support

We addressed 17 new features and improvements, and fixed 17 bugs.

MySQL Custom Queries

In 1.15 we are introducing the ability to …

The second alpha build of Percona XtraBackup 8.0.2 is now available in the Percona experimental software repositories.

Note that, due to the new MySQL redo log and data dictionary formats, the Percona XtraBackup 8.0.x versions will only be compatible with MySQL 8.0.x and Percona Server for MySQL 8.0.x. This release supports backing up Percona Server 8.0 Alpha.

For experimental migrations from earlier database server versions, you will need to backup and restore and using XtraBackup 2.4 and then use mysql_upgrade from MySQL 8.0.x

PXB 8.0.2 alpha is available for the following …

Offering over 110 conference sessions across Tuesday, 6 and Wednesday, 7 November, and a full tutorial day on Monday 5 November, we hope you’ll find that this fantastic line up of talks for Percona Live Europe 2018 to be one of our best yet! Innovation in technology continues to arrive at an accelerated rate, and you’ll find plenty to help you connect with the latest developments in open source database technologies at this acclaimed annual event.

Representatives from companies at the leading edge of our industry use the platform offered by Percona Live to showcase their latest developments and share plans for the future. If your career is dependent upon the use of open source database technologies you should not miss this conference!

…

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

I consider this to be the biggest news for the week: Alpha Build of Percona Server for MySQL 8.0. Experiment with it in a Docker container. It is missing column compression with dictionary support, native partitioning for TokuDB and MyRocks (excited to see that this is coming!), and encryption key rotation and scrubbing. All in, this should be a fun release to try, test, and also to file bugs for!

Database paradigms are changing, and it is interesting to see Cloudflare introducing Workers KV a key-value store, that is eventually consistent and highly distributed (at their global …

Alpha Build of Percona Server 8.0 released

An alpha version of Percona Server 8.0 is now available in the Percona experimental software repositories. This is a 64-bit release only. 

You may experiment with this alpha release by running it in a Docker container:

$ docker run -d -e MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=password -p 3306:3306 perconalab/percona-server:8.0.12.alpha

When the container starts, connect to it as follows:

$ docker exec -ti $(docker ps | grep -F percona-server:8.0.12.alpha | awk '{print $1}') mysql -uroot -ppassword

Note that this release is not ready for use in any production environment.

Percona Server 8.0 alpha is available for the following …

To use Percona XtraBackup with keyring_vault plugin enabled you need to take some special measures to secure a working backup. This post addresses how to backup Percona Server for MySQL with keyring_vault plugin enabled. We also run through the steps needed to restore the backup from the master to a slave.

This is the second of a two-part series on setting up Hashicorp Vault with Percona Server for MySQL with the keyring_vault plugin. First part is Using the keyring_vault plugin with Percona Server for MySQL 5.7.

Backing up from the master

First you need to install the latest Percona XtraBackup 2.4 package, in this tutorial I used this version:

[root@mysql1 ~]# xtrabackup --version
xtrabackup: recognized server arguments: --datadir=/var/lib/mysql --log_bin=mysqld-bin …

ProxySQL 1.4.10, released by ProxySQL, is now available for download in the Percona Repository along with an updated version of Percona’s proxysql-admin tool.

ProxySQL is a high-performance proxy, currently for MySQL and its forks (like Percona Server for MySQL and MariaDB). It acts as an intermediary for client requests seeking resources from the database. René Cannaò created ProxySQL for DBAs as a means of solving complex replication topology issues.

The ProxySQL 1.4.10 source and binary packages available at https://percona.com/downloads/proxysql …

This is the first of a two-part series on using the keyring_vault plugin with Percona Server for MySQL 5.7. The second part, Backing up Percona Server for MySQL with keyring_vault plugin enabled, walks through how to use Percona Xtrabackup to backup from this instance and restore to another server and set it up as a slave with keyring_vault plugin.

What is the keyring_vault plugin?

The keyring_vault is a plugin that allows the database to interface with a Hashicorp Vault server to store and secure encryption keys. The Vault server then acts as a centralized encryption key management solution which is critical for security and for compliance with various security standards.

Configuring Vault

Create SSL certificates to be used by Vault. You can use …

In my last post I compared data at-rest encryption features available for MySQL and MariaDB. As noted at the time, some of the features available for Percona Server for MySQL were in development, and the latest version (5.7.23) sees two of them released as ALPHA quality.

Encrypting the InnoDB system tablespace

The first of the new features is InnoDB system tablespace encryption via innodb_sys_tablespace_encrypt, which …