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 …

Pepper.com, the world’s largest community deal platform, has selected Percona to manage its open source database performance.

Pepper.com’s around-the-clock community seeks and finds the best offers in fashion, electronics, traveling and much more. With 500 million page views, over 25 million users and over 65,000 user-submitted deals per month across communities in America, Europe and Asia, Pepper has quickly risen to be the largest community deal platform worldwide.

When Pepper.com’s primary MySQL database administrator left the company, Pepper decided to shift to a managed service to maintain uptime …

This blog post will give a brief overview of Amazon RDS capabilities and limitations, and how Percona Support can help you succeed in your Amazon RDS deployments.

One of the common questions that we get from customers and prospective customers is about Percona Support with Amazon RDS. As many companies have shifted to the cloud, or are considering how to do so, it’s natural to try to understand the limitations inherent in different deployment strategies.

Why Use Amazon RDS?

As more companies move to using the cloud, we’ve seen a shift towards work models in technical teams that require software developers to take on more operational duties than they have traditionally. This makes it essential to abstract infrastructure so it can be interacted with as code, whether through automation or APIs. Amazon RDS presents a compelling DBaaS product with significant flexibility while maintaining ease of deployment.

Use …

The other day I was discussing new features of MySQL 5.7 with a Percona Support customer. After that conversation, I thought it would be a good idea to compile list of important features of MySQL 5.7. The latest MySQL 5.7.6 release candidate (RC) is out and is packed with nice features. Here’s a list of some MySQL 5.7 key features.

Replication Enhancements:

• One of the top features in MySQL 5.7 is multi-source replication. With multi-source replication you can point multiple master server’s to slave so limitation of slave having only one master is lift off. There is nice blog post written by my colleague on multi-source replication you will find useful.
• …

Two years ago Ovais Tariq had explained in detail what kinds of problems existed before MySQL introduced metadata locks in 5.5.3 and how these locks help to prevent them. Still, some implications of metadata locking in MySQL remain unclear for users – DBAs and even software developers that target recent MySQL versions. I’ve decided to include a slide or two into the presentation about InnoDB locks and deadlocks I plan to make (with my colleague Nilnandan Joshi) on April 16 at Percona Live 2015.

I decided to do this as …

Every day hundreds of millions of dollars are wasted by allowing improperly tuned or misconfigured systems, misunderstood infrastructure, and inefficient IT operations to live and thrive in data centers around the globe. There are both direct and indirect costs associated with allowing these unhealthy systems to continue to exist. Let’s look at some.

The setup:

Let us start by using a small example. We will start by looking at a small database setup. This setup will have a single master-slave, with a database size of lets say 500GB. Traffic is steady and let’s say this translates into 500 IOPS on the master. You have chosen to host this on Amazon’s AWS. A common way of ensuring backups occur in AWS is to setup ebs snapshots of the slave. In terms of usage, let us assume your CPU is about 50% used and you have about 20GB of hot data that needs to stay in the memory for the database.

If we look at what this …

Years ago when I worked for the MySQL Support organization at the original MySQL AB, we spoke about MySQL Support as insurance and focused on a value proposition similar to that of car insurance. For your car to be fully covered, you must purchase car insurance before the incident happens – in fact most places around the world require automobile insurance. Similarly with many organizations, any production-use technology might be mandated to have its own insurance in the way of 24/7 support.

I think however this is a very one-sided view that does not capture the full value (and ROI) that a MySQL Support contract with Percona provides. Let’s look at the different dimensions of value it provides based on the different support cases we have received throughout the years.

Reduce and Prevent …

Percona Toolkit is one of our most mature open source applications. Derived from Maatkit and Aspersa, Percona Toolkit has evolved significantly over the years. The software now contains 32 tools, over 4,000 tests, and has been downloaded over 250,000 times. Anyone who manages a database – from DBAs to system administrators to even software developers – benefits from Percona Toolkit’s ability to perform a variety of MySQL server and system tasks that are too difficult or complex to perform manually.

We continue to make Percona Toolkit better each month. Over the last 9 months alone Percona has had 6 releases and resolved nearly 50 issues.

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One of our Percona Support customers recently reported that Percona XtraBackup failed with a page corruption error on an InnoDB table. The customer thought it was a problem or bug in the Percona XtraBackup tool. After investigation we found that an InnoDB page was actually corrupted and a Percona XtraBackup tool caught the error as expected and hence the backup job failed.

I thought this would be an interesting topic and worthy of a blog post. In this article I will describe the innochecksum tool, when and how to use it and what are the possible fixes if an InnoDB table suffers from …

MySQL replication is a core process for maintaining multiple copies of data – and replication is a very important aspect in database administration. In order to synchronize data between master and slaves you need to make sure that data transfers smoothly, and to do so you need to act promptly regarding replication errors to continue data synchronization. Here on the Percona Support team, we often help customers with replication broken-related issues. In this post I’ll highlight the top most critical replication error code 1236 along with the causes and cure. MySQL replication error “Got fatal error 1236” can be triggered by multiple reasons and I will try to cover all of them.

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