In the last few days, there has been information released about yet another alleged data leak, placing in jeopardy “…[the] personal information on hundreds of millions of American adults, as well as millions of businesses.” In this case, the “victim” was Exactis, for whom data collection and data security are core business functions.

Some takeaways from Exactis

Please excuse the pun! In security, we have few chances to chuckle. In fact, as a Security Architect, I sigh deeply when I read about this kind of issue. Firstly, it’s preventable. Secondly, I worry that if an organization like Exactis is not getting it right, what chance the rest of the world?

As the Wired article notes the tool https://shodan.io/ can be revealing and well worth a look. For example, you …

In this post we will review the most important Linux settings to adjust for performance tuning and optimization of a MySQL database server. We’ll note how some of the Linux parameter settings used OS tuning may vary according to different system types: physical, virtual or cloud. Other posts have addressed MySQL parameters, like Alexander’s blog MySQL 5.7 Performance Tuning Immediately After Installation. That post remains highly relevant for the latest versions of MySQL, 5.7 and 8.0. Here we will focus more on the Linux operating system parameters that can affect database performance.

Server and Operating System

Here are some Linux parameters that you should check and consider modifying if you need to improve database performance.

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MariaDB 10.3 is now generally available (10.3.7 was released GA on 2018-05-25). The article What’s New in MariaDB Server 10.3 by the MariaDB Corporation lists three key improvements in 10.3: temporal data processing, Oracle compatibility features, and purpose-built storage engines. Even if I am excited about MyRocks and curious on Spider, I am also very interested in less flashy but still very important changes that make running the database in production easier. This post describes such improvement: no InnoDB Buffer Pool in core dumps.

Hidden in the …

Troubleshooting crashes is never a fun task, especially if MySQL does not report the cause of the crash. For example, when MySQL runs out of memory. Peter Zaitsev wrote a blog post in 2012: Troubleshooting MySQL Memory Usage with a lots of useful tips. With the new versions of MySQL (5.7+) and performance_schema we have the ability to troubleshoot MySQL memory allocation much more easily.

In this blog post I will show you how to use it.

First of all, there are 3 major cases when MySQL will crash due to running out of memory:

1. MySQL tries to allocate more memory than available because we specifically told it to do so. For example: you did not set innodb_buffer_pool_size correctly. This is very easy to fix
2. There is some other process(es) on the server that allocates RAM. It can be the application …

PMM (Percona Monitoring and Management) 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 release 1.12, we invested our efforts in the following areas:

• Visual Explain in Query Analytics – Gain insight into MySQL’s query optimizer for your queries
• New Dashboard – InnoDB Compression Metrics – Evaluate effectiveness of InnoDB Compression
• New Dashboard – MySQL Command/Handler Compare – Contrast MySQL instances side by side
• Updated …

Please join Percona’s Principal Support Escalation Specialist Sveta Smirnova as she presents Troubleshooting Best Practices: Monitoring the Production Database Without Killing Performance on Wednesday, June 27th at 11:00 AM PDT (UTC-7) / 2:00 PM EDT (UTC-4).

Register Now

During the MySQL Troubleshooting webinar series, I covered many monitoring and logging tools such as:

• General, slow, audit, binary, error log files
• Performance Schema
• Information Schema
• System …

Kubernetes, and its most popular distribution OpenShift, receives a lot of interest as a container orchestration platform. However, databases remain a foreign entity, primarily because of their stateful nature, since container orchestration systems prefer stateless applications. That said, there has been good progress in support for StatefulSet applications and persistent storage, to the extent that it might be already comfortable to have a production database instance running in Kubernetes. With this in mind, we’ve been looking at running Percona XtraDB Cluster in Kubernetes/OpenShift.

While there are already many examples on the Internet of how to start a single MySQL instance in Kubernetes, for serious usage we need to provide:

• High Availability: how can we guarantee availability …

Since MySQL 5.7.5, we have been able to resize dynamically the InnoDB Buffer Pool. This new feature also introduced a new variable — innodb_buffer_pool_chunk_size — which defines the chunk size by which the buffer pool is enlarged or reduced. This variable is not dynamic and if it is incorrectly configured, could lead to undesired situations.

Let’s see first how innodb_buffer_pool_size , innodb_buffer_pool_instances  and innodb_buffer_pool_chunk_size interact:

The buffer pool can hold several instances and each instance is divided into chunks. There is some information that we need to take into account: the number of instances can go from 1 to 64 and the total amount of chunks should not exceed 1000.

So, for a server with 3GB RAM, a buffer pool of 2GB with 8 instances and chunks at default value (128MB) we are going to get 2 chunks per instance:

This means that there will be 16 chunks.

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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 announces the GA release of Percona Server for MySQL 5.7.22-22 on on May 31, 2018. Download the latest version from the Percona web site or the Percona Software Repositories. You can also run Docker containers from the images in the Docker Hub repository.

Based on MySQL 5.7.22, including all the bug fixes in it, Percona Server for MySQL 5.7.22-22 is the current GA release in the Percona Server for MySQL 5.7 series. Percona …