In this blog post, we’ll look at how ioping can be used with other tools to understand and troubleshoot storage performance, specifically as it relates to MySQL workloads.

I recently ran into ioping, a nice little utility by Konstantin Khlebnikov that checks storage latency.  

For me, the main beauty of ioping is its simplicity and familiarity. It takes after the ubiquitous ping tool, but “pings” the storage instead of the network device.

First, let’s talk about what this tool isn’t: it isn’t a benchmark tool to stress load your storage as heavily as possible. For that, you can use iozone or sysbench (among many others). This also isn’t a tool for looking at …

Thank you for attending my webinar on Wednesday, December 20, 2017, InnoDB Performance Optimization. In this blog, I will provide answers to the Q & A for the webinar.

Are the T2 CPUs similar to the M4 series?

I would expect them to be similar. Amazon does not disclose what specific version of CPUs they use for T2 instances. More details are available here.

Delay in spinlock code is pretty old code. Need to optimize based on today’s CPU? Your views?

There have been a number of improvements to the InnoDB Spinlock code during the last few years. For example, using CPU …

Percona announces the release of Percona Toolkit 3.0.6 on January 4, 2018.

Percona Toolkit is a collection of advanced command-line tools that perform a variety of MySQL and MongoDB server and system tasks too difficult or complex for DBAs to perform manually. Percona Toolkit, like all Percona software, is free and open source.

You download packages from the website or install from official repositories.

This release includes the following changes:

New Features:

• PT-221: Improve pt-table-sync support for …

In 2017 we have welcomed many new customers into the Percona fold. It’s always interesting to find out what challenges the Percona team helped them to address and how they chose their relationship with Percona. As unbiased champions of open source database software, our consultancy, support and managed services staff apply their expertise across a wide range of technologies. Here are just a few stories from the past year.

Scaling applications on Amazon RDS the right way

Specializing in on-demand transportation services, Grab needed a high-availability, high performing database engine to serve their rapidly growing application. Grab operates in over 30 densely populated …

Let’s look at some of the most popular Percona Database Performance Blog posts in 2017.

The closing of a year lends itself to looking back. And making lists. With the Percona Database Performance Blog, Percona staff and leadership work hard to provide the open source community with insights, technical support, predictions and metrics around multiple open source database software technologies. We’ve had over three and a half million visits to the blog in 2017: thank you! We look forward to providing you with even better articles, news and information in 2018.

As 2017 moves into 2018, let’s take a quick look back at some of the most popular posts on the blog this year.

Top 10 Most Read

These posts had the most number of views (working down from the highest):

…

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

I think the biggest news from last week was from cPanel – if you haven’t already read the post, please do – on Being a Good Open Source Community Member: Why we hesitated on MySQL 5.7. cPanel anticipated MariaDB being the eventual replacement for MySQL, based on movements from Red Hat, Wikipedia and Google. The advantage focused on transparency around security disclosure, and the added features/improvements. Today though, “MySQL now consistently matches or outpaces MariaDB when it comes to development and releases, which in turn is increasing the demand on us for providing those upgraded versions of MySQL by our users.” And …

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

The Percona Live Call For Papers closes on December 22, but why aren’t you submitting already? Don’t wait till the last minute! Look at our broad scope as well. Worth noting that the best prices for tickets are available now until January 7.

FOSDEM is happening in Brussels, Belgium (like it has for the past many years). All I can say is that the schedule is out, and it was very hard to make a choice! See the …

Join Percona’s Chief Evangelist, Colin Charles as he presents 2017 Year in Review for Open Source Database Software on Wednesday, December 13, 2017 at 7:00 am PST / 10:00 am EST (UTC-8).

Register Here

2017 is soon coming to an end, and it’s good to pause and take a look at the past year to see the impact of new software release. Colin will discuss the changes, growth and trends that have affected software producers and enterprises using open source.

Key topics will include:

• How has the software supply chain landscape …

Percona latest blog poll asks how you currently host applications and databases. Select an option below, or leave a comment to clarify your deployment!

With the increased need for environments that respond more quickly to changing business demands, many enterprises are moving to the cloud and hosted deployments for applications and software in order to offload development and maintenance overhead to a third party. The database is no exception. Businesses are turning to using database as a service (DBaaS) to handle their data needs.

DBaaS provides some obvious benefits:

• Offload physical infrastructure to another vendor. It is the responsibility of whoever is providing the DBaaS service to maintain the physical environment – including hardware, software and best …

Prior to MySQL 5.7 client communications with a MySQL instance were unencrypted by default. This plaintext capability allowed for various tools including pt-query-digest to analyze TCP/IP traffic. Starting with MySQL 5.7 SSL is enabled by default and will be used in client communications if SSL is detected on the server.

We can detect and confirm this easily with the ngrep command.

Default client connection traffic (5.6)

On a MySQL 5.6 server we monitor the default MySQL port traffic.

mysql56$ sudo ngrep -d eth1 -wi -P ' ' -W single -l port 3306
interface: eth1 (192.168.42.0/255.255.255.0)
filter: ( port 3306 ) and ((ip || ip6) || (vlan && (ip || ip6)))
...

We connect to this server using TCP/IP.

host$ mysql -uexternal -p -h192.168.42.16
mysql56> select 'unencrypted';

We can observe the communication to and from the server (in this example 192.168.42.16) is …