It's not always obvious what makes one database type distinct from another. What are the most significant ways that Amazon Aurora is different from MySQL? Clear separators aren't always featured or widely known, but even slight variables between two databases can prove valuable in choosing which one is right for you and your organization.

In the case of Aurora, there are at least three interesting things that make it unique and that present opportunities for particular uses. (Thanks in advance to @saileshkrish for helping us stay in-the-know on what Aurora can do.)

Adaptive Thread Pool

wow pic.twitter.com/KeVY5VBEMS

— Preetam (@PreetamJinka) December 21, 2016

Aurora's thread pool …

In my previous post, we saw the usage of MySQL Group Replication (MGR) in single-primary mode. We know that Oracle does not recommends using MGR in multi-primary mode, but there is so much in the documentation and in presentations about MGR behavior in multi-primary, that I feel I should really give it a try, and especially compare this technology with the already existing multiple master solution introduced in 5.7: multi-source replication.

Installation

To this extent, I will set up two clusters using MySQL-Sandbox. The instructions for MGR in …

Overview

MySQL Group Replication was released as GA with MySQL 5.7.17. It is essentially a plugin that, when enabled, allows users to set replication with this new way.

There has been some confusion about the stability and usability of this release. Until recently, MySQL Group Replication (MGR) was only available in the Labs, which traditionally denotes a preview or an use-at-your-own-risk feature. Several months ago we saw the release of Group Replication as a Docker image, which allowed users to deploy a peer-to-peer cluster (every node is a master.) However, about one month after such release, word came from Oracle discouraging this setup, and inviting users to use Group Replicator in …

Recently I was testing data migration from MSSQL to MySQL using MySQL Workbench. My aim was to include data with all datatype available in MSSQL for migration. In this following blog post will see data migration prerequisites, migration steps and few common errors.

• About MySQL Workbench
• Prerequisite
• DATA SOURCE ODBC Configuration
• Required privileges on MS-SQL DB
• DB Servers Data Types …

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, …

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 …

Introduction I read a very interesting article by Krešimir Nesek regarding MySQL result set streaming when it comes to reducing memory usage. Mark Paluch, from Spring Data, asked if we could turn the MySQL result set streaming by default whenever we are using Query#stream or Query#scroll. That being said, the HHH-11260 issue was created, and … Continue reading How does MySQL result set streaming perform vs fetching the whole JDBC ResultSet at once →

MySQL continues to be one of the most popular databases used in cloud-native applications. In fact, MySQL is so popular that other cloud databases such as AWS Aurora maintain wire protocol compatibility with MySQL. For SREs and DevOps engineers running MySQL database in production, it is crucial to understand how to monitor MySQL. MySQL poor health can lead to cascading effects on other application components. For example, slow queries can impact page load times for an application, or missing indexes can result in high-latency and application time-outs. By effectively monitoring the performance of databases and query executions, SREs and DevOps can identify if there are bottlenecks in the database tier which affect the overall application performance. With this appreciation for the importance of MySQL monitoring, let us quickly survey what techniques are commonly used for MySQL monitoring and then discuss …

MySQL-Sandbox installs the MySQL server in isolation, by rejecting existing option files using the option --no-defaults. This is usually a good thing, because you don't want the initialization to be influenced by options in your /etc/my.cnf or other options files in default positions.

However, such isolation is also a problem when you need to add options during the initialization. One example is innodb-page-size, which can be set to many values, but only if the server was initialized accordingly. Thus, you can't set innodb-page-size=64K in your configuration file because the default value is different. It would fail, as InnoDB would conflict.

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