We met with Vinicius Grippa, a Senior Support Engineer at Percona. He is also active in the open source community and was recognized as a MySQL Rock Star in 2023. In the previous interview with Vinicius, we discussed the upcoming End of Life (EOL) for MySQL 5.7. Now that MySQL 5.7 has reached EOL, MySQL […]

As a Technical Account Manager at Percona, I get to work with many of our largest clients. While the industry verticals vary, one main core challenge generally remains the same – what do I do with all this data? Dealing with massive data sets in MySQL isn’t a new challenge, but the best approach still isn’t trivial. Each application is obviously different, but I wanted to discuss some of the main best practices around dealing with lakes of data.

Keep MySQL Instances Small

First and foremost, the architecture needs to be designed to keep each MySQL instance relatively small. A very common question I get from teams new to working with MySQL is: “So what is the largest instance size MySQL supports?”. My answer goes back to my time in consulting: “It depends”. Can my MySQL instance support a 20TB dataset? Maybe, but it depends on the workload pattern. Should I store 20TB of data in a single MySQL instance? In most cases, …

So your MySQL server has crashed.  What do you do now?  When a server is down, in my opinion, there are two steps that are essential and both are extremely important and neither should be neglected:

1. Save diagnostic information for determining the root cause analysis (RCA).
2. Get the server back up and running.

Too many people rush to Step #2 and lose pertinent diagnostics from Step #1.  Likewise, too many people will spend too much time on Step #1 and delay getting to Step #2 and restoring service.  The goal is to collect diagnostics as quickly as possible for later review while getting service restored as fast as possible.

As a Technical Account Manager (TAM) and assisting on server restoration calls, I have seen both issues at play.  Technical resources have a tendency to get so bogged down in trying to understand the cause of the server outage that they …

Nobody likes change, especially when that change may be challenging.  When faced with a technical challenge, I try to remember this comment from Theodore Roosevelt: “Nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty.”  While this is a bit of an exaggeration, in this case, the main concept is still valid.  We shouldn’t shy away from an upgrade path because it may be difficult.

MySQL 8.0 is maturing and stabilizing.  There are new features (too many to list here) and performance improvements.  More and more organizations are upgrading to MySQL 8 and running it in production, which expedites the stabilization.  While there is still some significant runway on 5.7 and it is definitely stable (EOL slated for October 2023), organizations need to be preparing to make the jump if they haven’t already. 

What Changed?

So …

In previous TAM Enterprise Experiences posts, we have outlined typical aspects of utilizing MySQL in an Enterprise environment. One thing we have not yet covered is the topic of database encryption, both from the standpoint of business requirements as well as some of the more technical aspects of encryption.

In this post, we will cover:

• Common enterprise compliance requirements
• Types of MySQL encryption
• Choosing the right encryption
• Vault

Common Compliance Requirements

Beyond the obvious security concerns with sensitive data, most enterprise businesses also need to meet various compliance requirements, with the compliance requirement(s) dependent on the country the business is located in, the type of business, and the type of data being stored. Note that in all cases, the onus is on the business to protect the data based on these compliance requirements. Some of …

As mentioned in the AWS discussion forum back in October, Amazon has started the end of life (EOL) process for RDS MySQL version 5.5. What this means is:

• AWS will upgrade RDS instances to MySQL 5.7 starting February 9 2021 00:00 UTC during your next defined maintenance window, provided you have one.
• If you don’t have a maintenance window defined, RDS will automatically upgrade you on March 9 00:00 UTC and there is no opt-out.

As any seasoned administrator knows, upgrades can be painful and things might go wrong.

Risks

I think we can safely assume that the upgrade will be performed in-place, as it would be too complex and time-consuming otherwise. Since a direct upgrade from 5.5 to 5.7 is not supported, we need to go through 5.6 first. This means instances need to be restarted twice; first to go from …

Google Cloud Platform (GCP), with its CloudSQL offering, has become a leading platform for database-as-a-service workload deployments for many organizations. Scale and High Availability have surfaced as primary goals for many of these deployments. Unfortunately, the attainment of these objectives has been challenging.

Often, the answer has been to simply add more CloudSQL databases. Many, however, have found a better solution in Percona’s fully managed MySQL environment based in Google’s GCE. Percona’s fully managed MySQL offering provides benefits similar to CloudSQL, plus the ability to run MySQL with an unlimited number of tables and much more reliable database availability. This has empowered these organizations to reclaim control over their architecture decisions. With Percona’s fully managed MySQL, your database architecture choices are once again based on your needs and the needs of your workload, rather than the capabilities …

MySQL 8.0 General Availability release was launched in April 2018, and since then there have been ten versions of MySQL 8 and Percona Server for MySQL released. The MySQL Community expressed a high opinion of the MySQL 8.0 advantages, so a lot of databases have been successfully upgraded to the new version. But many of them still need to be up to date.

Percona has prepared a free course “How to Upgrade to MySQL 8.0” that helps you with this task.

It is a series of useful videos for 3-4 minutes. At the end of the course, you can pass the QUIZ and get a certificate. 

Follow the link to take the course:  https://classroom.google.com/c/MTM2MDIyNDIzMDQy?cjc=zjsst4l

You can also join the course manually. Just open Google Classroom and click “Join class” and enter the code of the class “zjsst4l”. …

Our latest Solution Brief uses our relationship with Patreon to detail the ways that Percona services work together to provide customers with a complete database infrastructure solution.

Last year Patreon enlisted Percona’s help with their MySQL databases. Utilizing the full range of Percona Services (Managed Services, Support, Consulting, and Training) has allowed Patreon to make the most of their database infrastructure.

Percona worked with …

Here in Percona’s Training department, we like to think that we instruct our learners on the best practices for all things MySQL-related. In addition to performance tuning, query optimization, and replication configurations, another important topic is backups. Let’s dive in and discuss some of the basics and best practices around backups for MySQL.

Logical MySQL Backups

In MySQL, it is possible to take backups in two different forms. The first form, logical, is the most universal. Essentially, you create all of the necessary INSERT statements to repopulate your table data. The two most popular tools in the area are mysqldump and mydumper.

mysqldump

This tool has been around since the beginning and supports a slew of different options, too numerous to discuss in this post.

Here is a simple example for taking a logical backup of the …