Please join Percona’s Chief Evangelist, Colin Charles as he presents as he presents MariaDB 10.3 vs. MySQL 8.0 on Wednesday, July 18th, 2018, at 9:00 AM PDT (UTC-7) / 12:00 PM EDT (UTC-4).

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Technical considerations

Are they syntactically similar? Where do these two databases differ? Why would I use one over the other?

MariaDB 10.3 is on the path of gradually diverging from MySQL 8.0. One obvious example is the internal data dictionary currently under development for MySQL 8.0. This is a major change to the way metadata is stored and used within the server, and MariaDB doesn’t have an equivalent feature. Implementing this feature could mark the end of datafile-level compatibility between …

If you’re reading consumer SSD reviews and using them to estimate SSD performance under database workloads, you’d better stop. Databases are not your typical consumer applications and they do not use IO in the same way.

Let’s look, for example, at this excellent AnandTech review of Samsung 960 Pro –  a consumer NVMe device that I happen to have in my test lab.

The summary table is actually great, showing the performance both at Queue Depth 1 (single threaded) as well as Queue Depth 32 – a pretty heavy concurrent load.

Even at QD1 we see 50K (4K) writes per second, which should be enough for pretty serious database workloads.

In reality, though, you might be in for some disappointing surprises. While “normal” buffered IO is indeed quite fast, this drive really hates fsync() calls, with a single thread …

MySQL InnoDB Cluster is an Oracle High Availability solution that can be easily installed over MySQL to provide high availability with multi-master capabilities and automatic failover. In the previous post we presented the first component of InnoDB Cluster, group replication. Now we will go through the second component, MySQL Router.  We will address MySQL Shell in a final instalment of this three-part series. By then, you should have a good overview of the features offeed by MySQL InnoDB Cluster.

MySQL Router

This component is responsible for distributing the traffic between members of the cluster. It is a proxy-like solution to hide cluster topology from applications, so applications don’t …

Announcing the opening of the Percona Live Europe Open Source Database Conference 2018 in Frankfurt, Germany call for papers. It will be open from now until August 10, 2018. The conference takes place November 5–7.

Our theme this year is
Connect. Accelerate. Innovate.

As a speaker at Percona Live Europe, you’ll have the opportunity to CONNECT with your peers—open source database experts and enthusiasts who share your commitment to improving knowledge and exchanging ideas. ACCELERATE your projects and career by presenting at the premier open source database event, a great way to build your personal and company brands. And influence the evolution of the open source software movement by demonstrating how you INNOVATE!

Community initiatives …

Since MySQL 5.7.5, we have been able to resize dynamically the InnoDB Buffer Pool. This new feature also introduced a new variable — innodb_buffer_pool_chunk_size — which defines the chunk size by which the buffer pool is enlarged or reduced. This variable is not dynamic and if it is incorrectly configured, could lead to undesired situations.

Let’s see first how innodb_buffer_pool_size , innodb_buffer_pool_instances  and innodb_buffer_pool_chunk_size interact:

The buffer pool can hold several instances and each instance is divided into chunks. There is some information that we need to take into account: the number of instances can go from 1 to 64 and the total amount of chunks should not exceed 1000.

So, for a server with 3GB RAM, a buffer pool of 2GB with 8 instances and chunks at default value (128MB) we are going to get 2 chunks per instance:

This means that there will be 16 chunks.

…

Please join Percona’s CEO, Peter Zaitsev as he presents MySQL: Scaling and High Availability – Production Experience Over the Last Decade(s) on Tuesday, June 19th, 2018 at 7:00 AM PDT (UTC-7) / 10:00 AM EDT (UTC-4).

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Percona is known as the MySQL performance experts. With over 4,000 customers, we’ve studied, mastered and executed many different ways of scaling applications. Percona can help ensure your application is highly available. Come learn from our playbook, and leave this …

I frequently talk to our customer base about what keeps them up at night. While there is a large variance of answers, they tend to fall into one of two categories. The first is the conditioned fear of some monster lurking behind the scenes that could pounce at any time. The second, of course, is the actual monster of downtime on a critical system. Ask most tech folks and they will tell you outages seem to only happen late at night or early in the morning. And that they do keep them up.

Entire companies and product lines have been built around providing those in the IT world with some ability to sleep at night. Modern enterprises have spent millions to mitigate the risk and prevent their businesses from having a really bad day because of an outage. Cloud providers are attuned to the downtime dilemma and spend lots of time, money, and effort to build in redundancy and make “High Availability” (HA) as easy as possible. The frequency of …

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

Shortly after the last dispatch, I jetted off for a spot of vacation (which really meant I was checking out the hype behind Blockchain with a database developer lens at the Blockchain Week NYC), and then some customer visits in Seoul, which explains the short hiatus. Here’s to making this more regular as the summer approaches.

I am about to embark on a fairly long trip, covering a few upcoming appearances: Lisbon for the Percona Engineering meeting, SouthEastLinuxFest in Charlotte, the …

A data lake is “…a method of storing data within a system or repository, in its natural format, that facilitates the collocation of data in various schemata and structural forms…”1. Many companies find value in using a data lake but aren’t clear that they need to properly plan for it and maintain it in order to prevent issues.

The idea of a data lake rose from the need to store data in a raw format that is accessible to a variety of applications and authorized users. Hadoop is often used to query the data, and the necessary structures for querying are created through the query tool (schema on read) rather than as part of the data design (schema on write). There are other tools available for analysis, and many cloud providers are actively developing additional options for creating …

In this blog, I will show you how to install PMM on Linode as a low-cost database monitoring solution.

Many of my friends use Linode to run their personal sites, as well as small projects. While Linode is no match for Big Cloud providers in features, it is really wonderful when it comes to cost and simplicity: a Linode “nanode” instance offers 1GB of memory, 1 core, 20GB of storage and 1TB of traffic for just $5 a month.

A single Linode instance is powerful enough to use with Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) to monitor several systems, so I use Linode a lot when I want to demonstrate PMM deployment through Docker, rather than …