Welcome to a new weekly column on the Percona blog. My name is Colin Charles, Percona Chief Evangelist, and I have been involved in MySQL, MariaDB Server and the open source community for over a decade. Now I am at Percona, and this is my weekly column.

When you start a column, you have ask yourself what you’ll be writing about. Keeping the focus on the reader is what’s crucial. With this in mind, I plan to cover happenings, pointers and maybe even musings in this column. It’s August, and while many are away on summer vacations, there’s still plenty happening in the database world. So maybe this will be a little like the now-defunct, Weekly MySQL News. It will be broader than just MySQL, however, and focus on open source databases (after all, Percona’s mission is to …

One of the new graphs added to Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) is saturation metrics. This blog post explains how to use the information provided by these graphs.

You might have heard about Brendan Gregg’s USE Method  (Utilization-Saturation-Errors) as a way to analyze the performance of any system. Our goal in PMM is to support this method fully over time, and these graphs take us one step forward.

When it comes to utilization, there are many graphs available in PMM. There is the CPU Usage graph: …

Upstream platform vendors have announced the general end of life (EOL) for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (RHEL 5) and its derivatives, as well as Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. With this announcement comes some implications to support for Percona software running on these operating systems.

RHEL 5 was EOL as of March 31st, 2017 and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS was end of life as of April 28th, 2017. Pursuant to our end of life policies, we are announcing that these EOLs will go into effect for Percona software on August 1st, 2017. As of this date, we will no longer be producing new packages, binary builds, hotfixes, or bug fixes for Percona software on these platforms.

We …

In this post, we’ll use a blog poll to find out what operating system you use to run your development database servers.

In our last blog poll, we looked at what OS you use for your production database. Now we would like to see what you use for your development database.

As databases grow to meet more challenges and expanding application demands, they must try and get the maximum amount of performance out of available resources. How they work with an operating system can affect many variables, and help or hinder performance. The operating system you use for your database can impact consumable choices (such as hardware and memory). The operating system you use can also impact your choice of database engine as well (or vice versa).

When new projects, new applications or services or testing new architecture …

In this blog post, we’ll look at three different methods for installing Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM).

Percona offers multiple methods of installing Percona Monitoring and Management, depending on your environment and scale. I’ll also share comments on which installation methods we’ve decided to forego for now. Let’s begin by reviewing the three supported methods:

1. Virtual Appliance
2. Amazon Machine Image
3. Docker

Virtual Appliance

We ship an OVF/OVA method to make installation as simple as …

In this post, we’ll use a blog poll to find out what operating system you use to run your production database servers.

As databases grow to meet more challenges and expanding application demands, they must try and get the maximum amount of performance out of available resources. How they work with an operating system can affect many variables, and help or hinder performance. The operating system you use for your database can impact consumable choices (such as hardware and memory). The operation system you use can also impact your choice of database engine as well (or vice versa).

Please let us know what operating system you use to run your database. For this poll, we’re asking which operating system you use to actually run your production database server (not the base operating system).

If you’re running …

This blog post is a summary of the Percona Software and Roadmap Update – Q2 2017 webinar given by Peter Zaitsev on May 4, 2017. This webinar reflects changes and updates since the last update (Q1 2017).

A full recording of this webinar, along with the presentation slide deck, can be found here.

Percona Software

Below are the latest and upcoming features in Percona’s software. All of Percona’s software is 100% free and open source, with no …

Percona announces the release of Percona Toolkit 3.0.3 on May 19, 2017.

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 Percona Toolkit packages from the web site or install from official repositories.

This release includes the following changes:

New Features

• Added the --skip-check-slave-lag option for pt-table-checksum, …

The slides and videos from the Percona Live Open Source Database Conference 2017 are available for viewing and download. The videos and slides cover the keynotes, breakout sessions and MySQL and MongoDB 101 sessions.

To view slides, go to the Percona Live agenda, and select the talk you want slides for from the schedule, and click through to the talk web page. The slides are available below the talk description. There is also a page with all the slides that is searchable by topic, talk title, speaker, company or keywords.

To view videos, go to the …

I heard a frequent question at last week’s Percona Live conference regarding Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM): How much disk space should I allocate for PMM Server?

First, let’s review the three components of Percona Monitoring and Management that consume non-negligible disk space:

1. Prometheus data source for the time series metrics
2. Query Analytics (QAN) which uses Percona Server XtraDB (Percona’s enhanced version of the InnoDB storage engine)
3. Orchestrator, also backed by Percona Server XtraDB

Of these, you’ll find that Prometheus is generally your largest consumer of disk space. Prometheus hits a steady state of disk utilization once you reach the defined storage.local.retention period. If you deploy Percona Monitoring and Management …