From everyone at Percona and Percona Live 2017, we’d like to send a big thank you to all our sponsors, exhibitors, and attendees at this year’s conference.

This year’s conference was an outstanding success! The event brought the open source database community together, with a technical emphasis on the core topics of MySQL, MariaDB, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, AWS, RocksDB, time series, monitoring and other open source database technologies.

We will be posting tutorial and session presentation slides at the Percona Live site, and all of them should be available shortly. 

Highlights This Year:

• Informative tutorials on day one, including …

The last day of Percona Live 2017 is still going strong, with talks all the way until 4:00 pm (and closing remarks and a prize giveaway on the main stage then). I’m going to a few more sessions today, including one from Stephane Combaudon from Slice Technologies: Lessons learned while automating MySQL deployments in the AWS Cloud.

In this talk, Stephane discussed how automating deployments is a key success factor in the cloud. It is actually a great way to leverage the flexibility of the cloud. But often while automation is not too difficult for application code, it is much harder for databases. When Slice started automating their MySQL servers at Slice, they chose simple and production-proven …

Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) is a hosted database service in the AWS cloud. If your organization’s data is stored in one of the popular database systems, but on a company server or perhaps you’re renting a dedicated server, you might want to consider switching to Amazon RDS.  With Amazon RDS, you can choose from several relational database systems:  MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle, Postgres, and SQL Server, as well as Amazon Aurora.

There are many advantages to Amazon RDS, such as server scaling and load balancing of user traffic. Best of all, it can reduce the operational costs of running database software like MySQL. With Amazon RDS, you don’t need to worry about performing security updates, patching the operating system, or tuning the database. In fact, some of the patches Amazon deploys for MySQL and MariaDB are specifically designed to get better performance in a cloud setting.  Let’s look at some major …

In this blog post, we’ll look at how “operator error” can cause serious problems (like the one we saw last week with AWS), and how to avoid them in MySQL using

--i-am-a-dummy

.

Recently, AWS had some serious downtime in their East region, which they explained as the consequence of a bad deployment. It seems like most of the Internet was affected in one way or another. Some on Twitter dubbed it “S3 Dependency Awareness Day.”

Since the outage, many companies (especially Amazon!) are reviewing their production access and deployment procedures. It would be a lie if I claimed I’ve never made a mistake in production. In fact, I would be afraid of working with someone who claims to have never made a mistake in a production environment.

Making a mistake or two is how you learn to have a full sense …

This procedure can be used to expand an LVM  database volume on Amazon AWS (but also apply to any storage area network environment equally). Let me start with this assumption: when you create volumes for database use in AWS using EBS, you stripe data across them in order to enhance performance.  If you aren't doing this... well, you should :-) Under this assumption, when you need to add more disk space to an existing database volume, you can't just add the disk(s) to the volume, as this would make the added space non striped, and would eventually create hotspots in the dataset. The correct approach in this situation is to create a number of new EBS disks enough to contain entire dataset plus the desired added space,so that you can grow the existing dataset while re-striping properly.
To make this clear, let's suppose you have a dataset volume of  3 TB,  made of 3 1TB EBS volumes which are striped across, but space is running …

Please join Percona’s Jon Tobin, Director of Solution Engineering at Percona, and Rob Masson, Solutions Architect Manager at ScaleArc, on Thursday, January 26, 2017, at 9:00 am PST / 12:00 pm EST (UTC-8) for their webinar “Overcoming the Challenges of Databases in the Cloud.”

Enterprises enjoy the flexibility and simplified operations of using the cloud, but applying those advantages to database workloads has proven challenging. Resource contention, cross-region failover and elasticity at the data tier all introduce limitations. In addition, cloud providers support different services within their database offerings.

Jon and Rob’s webinar is a …

Amazon is releasing new products & services to it’s global cloud compute network at a rate that has all of our heads spinning. Join 32,000 others and follow Sean Hull on twitter @hullsean. Here’s new stuff worth mentioning around databases & data. 1. For ETL – AWS GLUE Moving data from your transactional MySQL or … Continue reading What products & improvements are new on AWS? →

When moving your MySQL instances to AWS, you would probably have to deal with this decision. This article will highlight some of the key factors that need to be considered in order to help you determine which is the most cost-effective solution for serving your data.

Introduction

RDS is based on EC2, so in this post I will focus on the benefits and disadvantages of using the former, versus migrating MySQL into user-managed EC2 instances.

The value of RDS resides in simplified provisioning and administration. Several of the most common maintenance tasks such as minor version upgrades, backups, and slave creation are automated and can be managed from the AWS console. On the other hand, RDS imposes some limitations to MySQL functionality so it could be offered “as a Service” while delivering a safe and consistent user experience. Within those limitations we can mention:

• Storage …

Overview

When working with Amazon AWS Aurora, there are some steps to consider when trying to get data out of an active Aurora master into a slave, potentially into a EC2 instance or offsite in another data centre. Creating an external mysql to Aurora gives the option to move out of Aurora, or to have the flexibility to move data around as desired. With AWS RDS instances this task is pretty simple because you can do the following :

1. Create a read replica
2. Stop the slave process
3. Capture the positioning
4. Dump the database

With Aurora it’s a little trickier, because a read replica in Aurora has no slave process. All of the replication is handled on the back end and cannot be controlled. However, setting up an external slave can be done.

Amazon AWS Documentation

In …

In this blog, we’ll use some test results to look at the rationale for using provisioned IOPS volumes for AWS databases.

One piece of advice you often hear running MySQL, MongoDB or other databases in the AWS EC2 environment is that you should use volumes with provisioned IOPs. This kind of makes sense on the “marketing” level, where provisioned IOPS (io1) volumes are designed for IO-intensive database workloads, while General Purpose (gp2) volumes are not. But if you go to the AWS volume type description, you will find that gp2s are shown to have pretty good IO performance. So where do all these supposed database performance problems for Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), with no provisioned IOs, come from?

Here is what I found out running experiments with a beta of …