Please join Percona’s Principal Technical Services Engineer, Sveta Smirnova as she presents “Troubleshooting Issues with MySQL Character Sets ” on March 9, 2017, at 11:00 am PST / 2:00 pm EST (UTC-8).

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Many MySQL novices find MySQL character sets support puzzling. But after you understand how it is designed, you will find it much more powerful than many other competing database solutions.

MySQL allows to specify a character set for every object, and change it online. For years this has helped to create fast applications that can work …

Please join Sveta Smirnova, Percona’s Principal Technical Services Engineer, as she presents Troubleshooting MySQL Access Privileges Issues on
February 23, 2017 at 11:00 am PST / 2:00 pm EST (UTC-8).

Do you have registered users who can’t connect to the MySQL server? Strangers modifying data to which they shouldn’t have access?

MySQL supports a rich set of user privilege options and allows you to fine tune access to every object in the server. The latest versions support authentication plugins that help to create more access patterns.

However, finding errors in …

Join Percona’s Chief Evangelist Colin Charles on Wednesday, January 18, 2017, at 7:00 am (PST) / 10:00 am (EST) (UTC-8) as he presents “Lessons from Database Failures.”

MySQL failures at scale can teach a great deal. MySQL failures can lead to a discussion about such topics as high availability (HA), geographical redundancy and automatic failover. In this webinar, Colin will present case study material (how automatic failover caused Github to go offline, why Facebook uses assisted failover rather than fully automated failover, and other scenarios) to look at how the MySQL world is making things better. One way, for example, is using …

Please join Percona’s Consultant David Ducos on Thursday, December 29, 2016 at 10 am PST/ 1:00 pm EST (UTC-8) as he presents JSON in MySQL 5.7.

Since it was implemented in MySQL 5.7, we can use JSON as a data type. In this webinar, we will review some of the useful functions that have been added to work with JSON.

We will examine and analyze how JSON works internally, and take into account some of the costs related to employing this new technology. 

At the end of the webinar, you will know the answers to the following questions: 

• What is JSON?
• Why don’t we keep using VARCHAR?
• How does it work? 
• What are the costs?
• What limitations should we take …

Join Percona’s Chief Evangelist Colin Charles on Thursday, November 3, 2016, at 10 am PDT/ 1:00pm EDT (UTC-7) as he presents “The MySQL Ecosystem in 2016.”

MySQL is a unique adult (now 21 years old) in many ways. It supports plugins. It supports storage engines. It is also owned by Oracle, thus birthing two branches of the popular opensource database: Percona Server and MariaDB Server. It also once spawned a fork: Drizzle. Lately, a consortium of web scale users (think a chunk of the top ten sites out there) have spawned WebScaleSQL.

You’re a busy DBA having to maintain this mix of technologies. Or you’re a CIO planning to choose one branch. How do you go about picking? Supporting multiple databases? Find out more in this talk. We will also take a deep-dive into what feature differences exist between MySQL/Percona …

In this blog, I will provide answers to the Q & A for the InnoDB Troubleshooting webinar.

First, I want to thank everybody for attending the August 11 webinar. The recording and slides for the webinar are available here. Below is the list of your questions that I wasn’t able to answer during the webinar, with responses:

Q: What’s a good speed for buffer pool speed/size for maximum query performance?

A: I am sorry, I don’t quite understand the question. InnoDB buffer pool is an in-memory buffer. In an ideal case, your whole active dataset (rows that are accessed by application regularly) should be in the buffer pool. There is a good …

Thank you for attending my 22nd July 2016 webinar titled “Top Most Overlooked MySQL Performance Optimizations“. In this blog, I will provide answers to the Q & A for that webinar.

For hardware, which disk raid level do you suggest? Is raid5 suggested performance-wise and data-integrity-wise?
RAID 5 comes with high overhead, as each write turns into a sequence of four physical I/O operations, two reads and two writes. We know that RAID 5s have some write penalty, and it could affect the performance on spindle disks. In most cases, we advise using alternative RAID levels. Use RAID 5 when disk capacity is more important than performance (e.g., archive databases …

Join Sveta Smirnova Thursday, August 11 at 10 am PDT (UTC-7) for a webinar on InnoDB Troubleshooting.

InnoDB is one of the most popular database engines. This general-purpose storage engine is widely used, has been MySQL’s default engine since version 5.6, and holds MySQL system tables since 5.7. It is hard to find a MySQL installation that doesn’t have at least one InnoDB table.

InnoDB is not a simple engine. It has its own locks, transactions, log files, monitoring, options and more. It is also under active development. Some of the latest features introduced in 5.6 are read-only transactions and multiple buffer pools (which now can persist on the disk between restarts). In 5.7, InnoDB …

Are you looking to improve your MySQL performance? Application success is often limited by poor MySQL performance. Please join Percona CEO and Founder Peter Zaitsev for this exclusive webinar on Wednesday, July 20th, 2016 at 11:00 AM PDT (UTC – 7) as he presents “Practical MySQL Performance Optimization“.

Peter Zaitsev discusses how to get excellent MySQL performance while being practical. In other words, spending time on what gives you the best return. The webinar updates Peter’s ever-popular Practical MySQL Performance Optimization presentation. It covers the important points for improving MySQL performance. It also includes a discussion of the new tools and features in the latest MySQL 5.7 …

Please join Sveta Smirnova for a webinar Thursday, July 14 at 10 am PDT (UTC-7) on an Introduction Into Storage Engine Troubleshooting.

The number of MySQL storage engines provide great flexibility for database users, administrators and developers. At the same time, engines add an extra level of complexity when it comes to troubleshooting issues. Before choosing the right troubleshooting tool, you need to answer the following questions (and often others):

• What part of the server is responsible for my issue?
• Was a lock set at the server or engine level?
• Is a standard or engine-specific tool better?
• Where are the engine-specific options?
• How to …