In this blog post, I’ll look at the types of NVMe flash health information you can get from using the NVMe command line tools.

Checking SATA-based drive health is easy. Whether it’s an SSD or older spinning drive, you can use the

smartctl

 command to get a wealth of information about the device’s performance and health. As an example:

root@blinky:/var/lib/mysql# smartctl -A /dev/sda
smartctl 6.5 2016-01-24 r4214 [x86_64-linux-4.4.0-62-generic] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-16, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org
=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 16
Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAG     VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE      UPDATED  WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
 1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate     0x002f   100   100   000 …

Valeriy Kravchuk’s great recent post on using oprofile to profile MySQL mentioned how pt-stalk, the script from Percona Toolkit to capture diagnostics data based on a detected condition, currently does not support the new operf comand, and relies instead on the deprecated and soon to be removed, opcontrol.

Fortunately, in the Open Source world, we deal with these situations by contributing, and this seemed a simple enough change that I could get a PR ready quickly and reply …

This blog post contains step-by-step instructions for setting up alerting in Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) using Grafana.

As a Solutions Engineer at Percona, I get to speak with a lot of the early adopters of Percona’s new PMM software. One of the frequent feature requests from them was the need for alerts at certain MySQL and MongoDB thresholds. Percona’s philosophy on alerting is that we don’t want to reinvent the wheel. We integrated Consul, Grafana and Prometheus into PMM because they are fantastic, free and open-source products. PMM packages them together in an easy to deploy and maintain format.

With the release of Grafana 4.0 came Alerting! The Grafana team excitedly shared this feature with its users (including Percona). Percona quickly followed suit by …

This post discusses archiving MySQL and MongoDB data, and determining what, when and how to archive data.

Many people store infrequently used data. This data is taking up storage space and might make your database slower than it could be. Archiving data can be a huge benefit, both regarding the performance impact and storage savings.

Why archive?

One of the reasons for archiving data is freeing up space on your database volumes. You can store archived data on slower, less expensive storage devices, and current data on the faster database drives. Archiving old data makes backups and restores run faster since they need to process less data. Last, but by no means least, archiving data has the benefit of making your queries perform more efficiently since they do not need to process through old …

This blog discusses how to prepare your database for the new leap second coming in the new year.

At the end of this year, on December 31, 2016, a new leap second gets added. Many of us remember the huge problems this caused back in 2012. Some of our customers asked how they should prepare for this year’s event to avoid any unexpected problems.

It’s a little late, but I thought discussing the issue might still be useful.

The first thing is to make sure your systems avoid the issue with abnormally high CPU usage. This was an problem in 2012 due to a Linux kernel bug. After the leap second was added, CPU utilization sky-rocketed on many systems, taking down …

Take Percona’s blog poll on what programming languages you’re using for backend development.

While customers and users focus and interact with applications and websites, these are really just the tip of the iceberg for the whole end-to-end system that allows applications to run. The backend is what makes a website or application work. The backend has three parts to it: server, application, and database. A backend operation can be a web application communicating with the server to make a change in a database stored on a server. Technologies like PHP, Ruby, Python, and others are the ones backend programmers use to make this communication work smoothly, allowing the customer to purchase his or her ticket with ease.

Backend programmers might not get a lot of credit, but they are the ones that design, …

This blog shows the results from Percona’s poll on what database technologies our readers use in their environment.

We design different databases for different scenarios. Using one database technology for every situation doesn’t make sense, and can lead to non-optimal solutions for common issues. Big data and IoT applications, high availability, secure backups, security, cloud vs. on-premises deployment: each have a set of requirements that might need a special technology. Relational, document-based, key-value, graphical, column family – there are many options for many problems. More and more, database environments combine more than one solution to address the various needs of an enterprise or application (known as polyglot persistence).

The following are the results of our poll on database …

Welcome to a new series of blogs: Percona Live featured tutorial speakers! In these blogs, we’ll highlight some of the tutorial speakers that will be at this year’s Percona Live conference. We’ll also discuss how these tutorials can help you improve your database environment. Make sure to read to the end to get a special Percona Live 2017 registration bonus!

In this Percona Live featured tutorial, we’ll meet Giuseppe Maxia, Quality Assurance Architect at VMware. His tutorial is on MySQL Document Store: SQL and NoSQL United. MySQL 5.7 introduced document store, which allows asynchronous operations …

In this blog post, we’ll discuss the differences between row store and column store databases.

Clients often ask us if they should or could be using columnar databases. For some applications, a columnar database is a great choice; for others, you should stick with the tried and true row-based option.

At a basic level, row stores are great for transaction processing. Column stores are great for highly analytical query models. Row stores have the ability to write data very quickly, whereas a column store is awesome at aggregating large volumes of data for a subset of columns.

One of the benefits of a columnar database is its crazy fast query speeds. In some cases, queries that took minutes or hours are completed in seconds. This makes columnar databases a good choice in a query-heavy …

This blog post reviews the appropriateness of Docker and other container solutions for your database environment.

A few weeks back, I wrote a fairly high-level blog post about containers. It covered what you should consider when thinking about using Docker, rkt, LXC, etc. I hope you’ve taken the chance to give it a quick read. It’s a good way to understand some of the disciplines you need to consider before moving to a new technology. However, it sparked a conversation in our Solutions Engineering team. Hopefully, the same one that you’re having in your organization: should customers run their database in containers? …