Welcome to another interview blog for the rapidly-approaching Percona Live 2018. Each post in this series highlights a Percona Live 2018 featured talk at the conference and gives a short preview of what attendees can expect to learn from the presenter.

This blog post highlights Jenni Snyder, Engineering Manager – Operations at Yelp. Her tutorial talk is titled The Accidental DBA. Open source relational databases like MySQL and PostgreSQL power some of the world’s largest websites. They can be used out of the box with few adjustments, and rarely require a dedicated Database …

Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) 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.

There are a number of significant updates in Percona Monitoring and Management 1.9.0 that we hope you will like, some of the key highlights include:

• Faster loading of the index page: We have enabled performance optimizations using gzip and HTTP2.
• AWS improvements: We have added metrics from CloudWatch RDS to 6 dashboards, as well as changed our AWS add instance workflow, and made …

In this blog post, we’ll show that you can plot MySQL data in real time using Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM).

In my previous blog post, I showed how we could load into any metrics, benchmarks into MySQL and visualize it with PMM. But that’s not all! We can even visualize most any kind of data from MySQL in real time. I am falling in love with the MySQL plugin for Grafana — it just makes things so easy and smooth.

This graph shows us the number of visitors to a website in real …

In this blog post, I’ll look at how you can analyze MySQL audit logs (Percona Server for MySQL) with ClickHouse and ClickTail.

Audit logs are available with a free plugin for Percona Server for MySQL (https://www.percona.com/doc/percona-server/LATEST/management/audit_log_plugin.html). Besides providing insights about activity on your server, you might need the logs for compliance purposes.

However, on an active server, the logs can get very large. Under a sysbench-tpcc workload, for …

In this blog post, we’ll discuss some of the options available when purging binary logs. We’ll look at how to safely purge them when you have slaves in your topology and want to avoid deleting any binary log that still needs to be applied.

We generally want to ensure that, before purging the binary logs from the master, all logs were applied to the slaves to avoid halting them. The example error below is a classic case of a binary log purged before being applied on the slave:

Last_IO_Errno: 1236
Last_IO_Error: Got fatal error 1236 from master when reading data from binary log: ‘Could not open log file’

MySQL offers some options to purge of binary logs. One of them is executing the PURGE BINARY LOGS command. The  …

In this blog post, we’ll look at how you can verify query performance using ProxySQL.

In the previous blog post, I showed you how many information can you get from the “stats.stats_mysql_query_digest” table in ProxySQL. I also mentioned you could even collect and graph these metrics. I will show you this is not just theory, it is possible.

These graphs could be very useful to understand the impact of the changes what you made on the query count or execution time.

I used our all-time favorite benchmark tool called Sysbench. I was running the following query:

UPDATE sbtest1 SET c=? WHERE k=?

There was no index on “k” when I started the test. During the test, I …

In this blog post, we’ll look at how to create PMM custom graphs and dashboards to track what you need to see in your database.

Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM)‘s default set of graphs is pretty complete: it covers most of the stuff a DBA requires to fully visualize database servers. However, sometimes custom information is needed in graphical form. Otherwise, you just feel your PMM deployment is a missing a graph.

Recently, a customer request came in asking for a better understanding of a specific metric: table growth, or more specifically the daily table growth (in bytes) for the last 30 days.

The graph we came up with looks like this:
. . .which …

Please join Percona’s Principal Support Engineer, Sveta Smirnova, as she presents Basic External MySQL Troubleshooting Tools on March 15, 2018 at 10:00 am PDT (UTC-7) / 1:00 pm EDT (UTC-4).

In my troubleshooting webinar series, I normally like to discuss built-in instruments available via the SQL interface. While they are effective and help to understand what is going on, external tools are also designed to make life of a database administrator easier.

In this webinar, I will discuss the external tools, toolkits and graphical instruments most valued by Support teams and customers. I will show the main advantages of these tools, and provide examples on how to effectively …

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

Have you been following the Meltdown/Spectre performance regressions? Some of the best blog posts have been coming from Brendan Gregg, who’s keynoting at Percona Live this year. We’ve also got Scott Simpson from Upwork giving a keynote about how and why they use MongoDB. This is in addition to all the other fun talks we have, so please register now. Don’t forget to also book your hotel room!

Even though the Percona Live conference now covers much more …

In this blog post, we’ll look at how to turn on binlog encryption in Percona Server for MySQL.

Why do I need this?

As you probably know, Percona Server for MySQL’s binlog contains sensitive information. Replication uses the binlog to copy events between servers. They contain all the information from one server so that it can be applied on another. In other words, if somebody has access to a binlog, it means they have access to all the data in the server. Moreover, said person (or, “Hacker”) could create a clone copy of our server by just making a replica of it. In the end, they have access to our binlog. This shows how important protecting a binlog really is – leakage of binlogs not only make a particular table/tablespace or a group of tables accessible to a hacker, but literally the whole server …