By having appropriate indexes on your MySQL tables, you can greatly enhance the performance of SELECT queries. But, did you know that adding indexes to your tables in itself is an expensive operation, and may take a long time to complete depending on the size of your tables? During this time, you are also likely to experience a degraded performance of queries as your system resources are busy in index-creation work as well. In this blog post, we discuss an approach to optimize the MySQL index creation process in such a way that your regular workload is not impacted.

MySQL Rolling Index Creation

We call this approach a ‘Rolling Index Creation’ - if you have a MySQL master-slave replica set, you can create the index one node at a time in a rolling fashion. You should create the index only on the slave nodes so the master’s …

Recently I was doing some small testing by using EC2 instances on AWS and I noticed the execution time and performance highly depend on which time of the day I am running my scripts. I was using t3.xlarge instance type as I didn’t need many CPUs and memory for my tests, but from time to time I planned to use all the resources for a short time (few minutes), and this is when I noticed the difference.

First, let’s see what AWS says about T3 instances:

T3 instances start in Unlimited mode by default, giving users the ability to sustain high CPU performance over any desired time frame while keeping cost as low as possible.

In theory, I should not have any issues or performance differences. I have also monitored the CPU credit balance and there was no correlation between the balance and the performance at all, and because these were unlimited instances the balance should not have any impact.

AWS is the #1 cloud provider for open-source database hosting, and the go-to cloud for MySQL deployments. As organizations continue to migrate to the cloud, it’s important to get in front of performance issues, such as high latency, low throughput, and replication lag with higher distances between your users and cloud infrastructure. While many AWS users default to their managed database solution, Amazon RDS, there are alternatives available that can improve your MySQL performance on AWS through advanced customization options and unlimited EC2 instance type support. ScaleGrid offers a compelling alternative to hosting MySQL on AWS that offers better performance, more control, and no cloud vendor lock-in and the same price as Amazon RDS. In this post, we compare the performance of MySQL Amazon RDS …

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Oracle announced this week at Oracle OpenWorld that it has introduced a new cloud offer called Oracle Cloud Free Tier. As the name suggest, it allows you to run a few limited instances in Oracle Cloud for free. I will in this blog show how you can use the free tier to setup a MySQL test instance.

Tip

If you want to read more about Oracle Cloud Free Tier see https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/ and the FAQ at https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/faq.html.

The first step is to sign up for the cloud service which you do by opening …

Overview The Skinny

In this blog post, we explore the correct way to implement bi-directional Tungsten Replication between AWS Aurora and Tungsten Clustering for MySQL databases.

Background The Story

When we are approached by a prospect interested in using our solutions, we are proud of our pre-sales process by which that we engage at a very deep technical level to ensure the we provide the best possible solution to meet with the prospect’s requirements. This involves an in-depth hands-on POC, in addition to the significant time and effort we spend building and testing the solution architectures in our lab environment as part of the proposal process.

From time to time, we are presented with requirements that are not always quite so straight forward. Just recently we faced such a situation. A …

A commonly encountered scenario is when EBS volumes are not performing at the expected theoretical performance. Let’s look at some of the potential reasons for that and how we can “fix” it. (When I say EBS volume, I am talking about SSDs specifically. I rarely see HDDs in use anymore.)

Planning for success

First of all, keep in mind that theoretical IOPS are based on an IO size of 16KB. If you are doing 32KB operations and have a volume rated 1000 IOPS, it means you effectively have 500 IOPS available.

Instance type is closely related to IO performance. When working with databases, you want to use an EBS-optimized instance type. This ensures dedicated bandwidth is available to the IO layer. In addition to that, instance types have a cap on bandwidth and IOPS. So when picking your instance type, don’t base the …

Mid September, MySQL Community, MySQL Customers and MySQL Engineers will be in San Francisco to share their experience and present the new features of your favorite database !

The event will be held in Moscone South (just Mirko Ortensi‘s Hands-on Lab will be delivered in Moscone West).

During the week, the MySQL Community Team will host the traditional MySQL Reception. We got so great feedback from last year that we decided to renew the experience in the same awesome location, the Samovar Tea Lounge at Yerba Buena Gardens. Don’t forget that you need to register for this reception but no OOW pass is required. Please register here !

Back to the conference, you can find the full schedule for the session in the …

WordPress is the largest website builder platform in the world, supporting over 34% of all websites on the internet today. MySQL is a free open source relational database management system that is leveraged across a majority of WordPress sites, and allows you to query your data such as posts, pages, images, user profiles, and more. As any WordPress developer knows, each installation requires a database in the backend, and MySQL is the database of choice for storing and retrieving your WordPress data.

In order for your WordPress website to be able to access, store and retrieve the data in your MySQL database, it needs to be hosted online through a cloud computing service. ScaleGrid offers a convenient way to setup and configure MySQL hosting for your …

With such a wide range of options available for running MySQL based servers in Amazon cloud environments, how do you choose? There’s no doubt it’s a challenge. In this two-part series of blog posts, we’ll try to draw a fair and informative comparison based on well-established benchmark scenarios – at scale.

In part one we will discuss the performance of the current Amazon RDS services – Amazon Aurora and Amazon RDS for MySQL – and compare it with the performance of Percona Server with InnoDB and RocksDB engines. And in part two we will go over costs and efficiencies to look for. All this information is necessarily number-heavy, but hopefully, you’ll enjoy the experiments!

Evaluation scenario The benchmark scripts

For these evaluations, we use the …

Are you looking to get started with the world’s most popular open-source database, and wondering how you should setup your MySQL hosting? So many default to Amazon RDS, when MySQL performs exceptionally well on Azure Cloud. While Microsoft Azure does offer a managed solution, Azure Database, the solution has some major limitations you should know about before migrating your MySQL deployments. In this post, we outline the best way to host MySQL on Azure, including managed solutions, instance types, high availability replication, backup, and disk types to use to optimize your cloud database performance.

MySQL DBaaS vs. Self-Managed MySQL

The first thing to consider when weighing between self-management and a MySQL Database-as-a-Service …