Serverless is a new buzzword in the database industry. Even though it gets tossed around often, there is some confusion about what it really means and how it really works. Serverless architectures rely on third-party Backend as a Service (BaaS) services. They can also include custom code that is run in managed, ephemeral containers on a Functions as a Service (FaaS) platform. In comparison to traditional Platform as a Service (PaaS) server architecture, where you pay a predetermined sum for your instances, serverless applications benefit from reduced costs of operations and lower complexity. They are also considered to be more agile, allowing for reduced engineering efforts.

In reality, there are still servers in a serverless architecture: they are just being used, managed, and maintained outside of the application. But isn’t that a lot like what cloud providers, such as Amazon RDS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure, are already …

Since summer 2017, Amazon RDS supports encryption at rest using AWS Key Management Service (KMS) for db.t2.small and db.t2.medium database instances, making the feature now available to virtually every instance class and type.

Unless you are running Previous Generation DB Instances or you can only afford to run a db.t2.micro, every other instance class now supports native encryption at rest using KMS. As for the Amazon documentation:

Encryption on smaller T2 database instances is useful for development and test use cases, where you want the environment to have identical security …

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

Shortly after the last dispatch, I jetted off for a spot of vacation (which really meant I was checking out the hype behind Blockchain with a database developer lens at the Blockchain Week NYC), and then some customer visits in Seoul, which explains the short hiatus. Here’s to making this more regular as the summer approaches.

I am about to embark on a fairly long trip, covering a few upcoming appearances: Lisbon for the Percona Engineering meeting, SouthEastLinuxFest in Charlotte, 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.

In PMM Release 1.11.0, we deliver the following changes:

• Configurable MySQL Slow Log Rotation – enable or disable rotation, and specify how many files to keep on disk
• Predictable Graphs – we’ve updated our formulas to use aggregation functions over time for more reliable graphs
• MySQL Exporter Parsing of my.cnf – we’ve improved how we read my.cnf
• Annotation improvements – passing …

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you likely know I like the ZFS filesystem a lot. ZFS has many very interesting features, but I am a bit tired of hearing negative statements on ZFS performance. It feels a bit like people are telling me “Why do you use InnoDB? I have read that MyISAM is faster.” I found the comparison of InnoDB vs. MyISAM quite interesting, and I’ll use it in this post.

To have some data to support my post, I started an AWS i3.large instance with a 1000GB gp2 EBS volume. A gp2 volume of this size is interesting because it is above the burst IOPS level, so it offers a constant 3000 IOPS performance level.

I used sysbench to create a table of 10M rows and then, using export/import tablespace, I copied it 329 times. I ended up with 330 tables for a total size of about 850GB. The dataset generated by sysbench is not very compressible, so I used lz4 compression in ZFS. …

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

rootconf.in 2018 just ended, and it was very enjoyable to be in Bangalore for the conference. The audience was large, the conversations were great, and overall I think this is a rather important conference if you’re into the “DevOps” movement (or are a sysadmin!). From the data store world, Oracle MySQL was a sponsor, as was MyDBOPS (blog), and Elastic. There were plenty more, including Digital Ocean/GoJek/Walmart Labs — many MySQL users.

I took a handful of pictures with people, and here are some of the MyDBOPS team and myself.  They have over 20 …

Welcome to Percona Live 2018 keynotes, day one!

Percona Live 2018 is up and running! We call this day one, but in reality, yesterday was filled with tutorials that provided excellent and practical information on how to get your MySQL, MongoDB, MariaDB and PostgreSQL environments up, running and optimized.

Today we started with keynote presentations from Percona, a technology panel, Oracle and Netflix. You can view the recording of today’s keynotes here.

Percona Welcome

Laurie Coffin (Percona)

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It’s hard to believe Percona Live 2018 starts on Monday! We’re looking forward to seeing everyone in Santa Clara next week! Here are some quick highlights to remember:

• In addition to all the amazing sessions and keynotes we’ve announced, we’ll be hosting the MySQL Community Awards and the Lightning Talks on Monday during the Opening Reception.
• We’ve also got a great lineup of demos in the exhibit hall all day Tuesday and Wednesday – be sure to stop by and learn more about open source database products and tools.
• On Monday, we …

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.

We focused mainly on two features in 1.10.0, but there are also several notable improvements worth highlighting:

• Annotations – Record and display Application Events as Annotations using pmm-admin annotate
• Grafana 5.0 – Improved visualization effects
• Switching between Dashboards – Restored functionality to preserve host when switching dashboards
• New Percona XtraDB Cluster Overview graphs …

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

Percona Live is just over a week away — there’s an awesome keynote lineup, and you really should register. Also don’t forget to save the date as Percona Live goes to Frankfurt, Germany November 5-7 2018! Prost!

In acquisitions, we have seen MariaDB acquire MammothDB and …