The requirements for managing and running a database in a modern enterprise have evolved over the past ten years. Those in charge of running enterprise databases have seen their focus shift from ensuring access and availability, to architecture, design and scalability responsibilities. Web-first companies pioneered the change by charging site reliability engineers (SRE’s) or multi-faceted DBAs with the task of ensuring that the company’s main revenue engine not only stayed up, but could scale to wherever the business needed to go. This is a far cry from the classic enterprise DBA’s top responsibilities: keep it up, keep it backed up, and react to issues as they present themselves.

Today, enterprises look for new revenue models to keep up with a shifting technology paradigm driven by the cloud. The requirements and needs for managing their database environments are changing along with this shift. In the SaaS world, application outages …

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 continues the ongoing series on daily operations and GTID replication.

In this blog, I’m going to investigate why the error below has been appearing in a special environment I’ve been working with on the last few days:

Last_IO_Errno: 1236
Last_IO_Error: Got fatal error 1236 from master when reading data from binary log:
'The slave is connecting using CHANGE MASTER TO MASTER_AUTO_POSITION = 1, but the
master has purged binary logs containing GTIDs that the slave requires.'

The error provides the right message, and explains what is going on. But sometimes, it can be a bit tricky to solve this issue: you need additional information discovered after some tests and readings. We try and keep Managed Services scripted, in the sense that our advice and best practices …

This post discusses ways of fixing broken GTID replication.

This blog series is all about the daily stories we have in Managed Services, dealing with customers’ environments (mostly when we need to quickly restore a service level within the SLA time).

One of the issues we encounter daily is replication using the GTID protocol. While there are a lot of blogs written about this subject, I would like to just highlight GTID replication operations, and the way you can deal with broken replication.

Most of the time we face way more complex scenarios then the one I’m about to present as an example, but the main goal of this blog is to quickly highlight the tools that can be used to fix issues to resume replication.

After reading this blog, you might ask yourself “Now, we …

This post is a follow-up to my November 19 webinar, “Tips from the Trenches: A Guide to Preventing Downtime for the Over-Extended DBA,” during which I described some of the most common reasons DBAs experience avoidable downtime. The session was aimed at the “over-stretched DBA,” identified as the MySQL DBA short of time or an engineer of another discipline without the depth of the MySQL system. The over-stretched DBA may be prone to making fundamental mistakes that cause downtime through poor response time, operations that cause blocking on important data or administrative mishaps through the lack of best practice monitoring and alerting. (You can download my slides and view the recorded webinar here.)

Monitor the things
One of the aides to keeping the system up and …

MySQL table alterations can interrupt production traffic causing bad customer experience or in worst cases, loss of revenue. Not all DBAs, developers, syadmins know MySQL well enough to avoid this pitfall. DBAs usually encounter these kinds of production interruptions when working with upgrade scripts that touch both application and database or if an inexperienced admin/dev engineer perform the schema change without knowing how MySQL operates internally.

Truths
* Direct MySQL ALTER table locks for duration of change (pre-5.6)
* Online DDL in MySQL 5.6 is not always online and may incurr locks
* Even with Percona Toolkit‘s pt-online-schema-change there are several workloads that can experience blocking

Here on the Percona MySQL …

The Percona Managed Services team recently faced a somewhat peculiar client issue. We’d receive pages about their MySQL service being unreachable. However, studying the logs showed nothing out of the ordinary…. for the most part it appeared to be a normal shutdown and there was nothing in anyone’s command history nor a cron task to speak of that was suspicious.

This is one of those obscure and peculiar (read: unique) issues that triggered an old memory; I’d seen this behavior before and I had just the tool to catch the culprit in the act.

Systemtap made diagnostics of this issue possible and I can’t state enough how much of a powerful and often under-utilized tool set systemtap really is.

cat > signals.stp << EOF
probe signal.send {
if (sig_name == …

The Percona Backup Service managed service launched today. It ensures properly configured backups run successfully as scheduled on customer provided backup storage – whether on premise, in the cloud, or a hybrid. Backup issues or production data recovery are efficiently handled by Percona Managed Services technicians with deep knowledge of MySQL.

As we state in our white papers, “MySQL backup and recovery are a foundational piece of any infrastructure. A well-tested backup and recovery system can be the difference between a minor outage and the end of a business.” While MySQL backups are “foundational,” they …