One of the more common struggles I’ve had to assist with in regard to Amazon RDS is enabling binary logging on read replicas, or forming multi-tier replication in instances using version 5.6 or later after seeing that multi-tier replication is not supported in version 5.5 (for a reason that will become clear by the end of this post.)

First off, let’s have a look at the topology that I have in place in my AWS account. As you’ll see below I have a master, blog1, and a read replica that I created via the AWS console called blog2. You’ll also notice that, despite being supported, if I select instance actions while having blog2 highlighted the option to create a read replica is grayed out.

Further, if we use the MySQL CLI to connect to blog2 and check the global variables for log_bin and binlog_format, you’ll see that binary logging is off and binlog_format is set to statement. This is strange considering that the parameter …

The Aurora hash join feature for relational databases has been around for a while now. But unlike MySQL Block Nested Loop algorithm, an Aurora hash join only caters to a specific number of use cases. When implemented with the optimizer properly, they can provide great benefits with certain workloads. Below we’ll see a brief example of a quick win.

This new feature is available in Aurora lab mode version 1.16. Because this is a lab feature, it’s important to make sure to test your queries before upgrading, especially if you are looking to scale up to the new R4 instances before the Superbowl to avoid hitting the same problem I discuss below.

When lab mode is enabled and

hash_join

  is ON, you can verify the optimizer feature from the

optimizer_switch

 variable:

via GIPHY I was at a dinner party recently, and talking with some colleagues. I had worked with them years back on Oracle systems. One colleague Maria said she really enjoyed my newsletter. Join 38,000 others and follow Sean Hull on twitter @hullsean. She went on to say how much has changed in the last …

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Take a look at the sneak peek of the breakout sessions for the Percona Live 2018 Open Source Database Conference, taking place April 23-25, 2018 at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, California. Early Bird registration discounts are available until February 4, 2018, and sponsorship opportunities are still available.

Conference breakout sessions will feature a range of in-depth talks related to each of the key areas. Breakout session examples include:

• Database Security as a Function: Scaling to Your Organization’s Needs – Laine Campbell, …

High availability for MySQL has become increasingly relevant given the ever increasing rate of adoption and implementation. It’s no secret to anyone in the community that the popularity of MySQL has become noteworthy. I still remember my start with MySQL in the early 5.0 days and people told me that I may not want to consider wasting my time training on a database that didn’t have a large industry adoption, but look at where we are now! One of my favorite pages to cite when trying to exhibit this fact is the db-engines.com ranking trend page where we can see that MySQL is right up there and contending with enterprise products such as Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle.

MySQL has gone from being part of the ever famous LAMP stack for users looking to set up their first website to seeing adoption from major technical players such as …

In 2017 we have welcomed many new customers into the Percona fold. It’s always interesting to find out what challenges the Percona team helped them to address and how they chose their relationship with Percona. As unbiased champions of open source database software, our consultancy, support and managed services staff apply their expertise across a wide range of technologies. Here are just a few stories from the past year.

Scaling applications on Amazon RDS the right way

Specializing in on-demand transportation services, Grab needed a high-availability, high performing database engine to serve their rapidly growing application. Grab operates in over 30 densely populated …

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Today, keeping your enterprise agile and flexible is not just an advantage, it is a requirement. Many of the systems and processes once controlled by businesses onsite are moving offsite to “service” models. This includes Platform as a Service (PaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Database as a Service (DBaaS), etc.

These services are usually referred to as being in the cloud. The enterprise using the service doesn’t maintain or manage the infrastructure of the service in question.

Migrating database workloads to the cloud can be a vital part of improving customer experience, gaining deeper business insights and increasing efficiency. More enterprises are …

While investigating alternatives to migrate to Google Cloud SQL, I encountered a lack of support for external masters. However, it’s possible to overcome this limitation by replicating into Google Cloud SQL using Tungsten replicator.

Cloud SQL is Google’s database-as-a-service solution, similar to RDS for Amazon Web Services. You can get a fully managed database in only a few clicks (or API calls). At the time of writing this, the only supported databases are MySQL and Postgres.

Cloud SQL alternatives

Google offers two different options for MySQL deployments.

1st generation instances:

• Only MySQL versions 5.5 and 5.6 can provisioned
• Max memory is limited to 16 Gb
• Max of 250 Gb storage (up to 500 Gb with Silver or higher support package)
• MyISAM and InnoDB
• Asynchronous replication for read replicas

2nd generation instances:

In this blog post I’ll look at the performance of Percona XtraDB Cluster on AWS using different service instances, and recommend some best practices for maximizing performance.

You can use Percona XtraDB Cluster in AWS environments. We often get questions about how best to deploy it, and how to optimize both performance and spend when doing so. I decided to look into it with some benchmark testing.

For these benchmark tests, I used the following configuration:

• Region:
  • Availability zones: US East – 1, zones: b, c, d
  • Sysbench 1.0.8
  • ProxySQL 1.4.3
  • 10 tables, 40mln records – ~95GB dataset
  • Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.7.18
  • Amazon Linux AMI

We …

Percona latest blog poll asks how you currently host applications and databases. Select an option below, or leave a comment to clarify your deployment!

With the increased need for environments that respond more quickly to changing business demands, many enterprises are moving to the cloud and hosted deployments for applications and software in order to offload development and maintenance overhead to a third party. The database is no exception. Businesses are turning to using database as a service (DBaaS) to handle their data needs.

DBaaS provides some obvious benefits:

• Offload physical infrastructure to another vendor. It is the responsibility of whoever is providing the DBaaS service to maintain the physical environment – including hardware, software and best …