ProxySQL is a great tool. It’s one of the most recommended technologies in our Open Source Database practice.

Many of our clients are running it or are migrating towards it, but we’ve seen that it is pretty CPU-intensive. We’ve also seen strange behavior in the connection handling when reaching the CPU saturation point.

At this point, we noticed that the frontend_connections counter in the stats_mysql_users table was not decreasing even after the connections were no longer present at the network level. This counter is used to check the max_connections value in the mysql_users configuration table, causing frontend connections to receive a “Too many connections” error. So we determined that the key element here is to scale it properly. Obviously, all the major cloud providers can help us here as they all have features like auto-scaling groups.

Jervin Real of Percona has recently …

When Skillz, a leading mobile eSports platform connecting 2.6 billion gamers across the globe, sought Pythian’s help with reducing storage costs, they learned they could not only reduce costs but also gain a more responsive application while providing an improved player experience.

The gaming company collects data to customize player experiences by delivering relevant campaigns, performing fraud and cheater detection, segmenting markets, and providing special offers according to region or interest. However, the Skillz environment was complex, comprising of many layers and very complex code, as well as geographical data, and their existing analytics were costly and slow. “We were running these applications hourly to customize these different features, then finding ourselves wishing we could do that much more quickly,” said Miriam Aguirre, VP Engineering at Skillz.

Skillz wanted to move to an ‘event-driven’ analytics …

There are already many tools for MySQL to perform backups and consistent restores, but this time I’d like to elaborate on how to take advantage of the kindness the cloud, which gives us Persistent Disk Snapshots (PSD) to restore our data set in a consistent way.

In this entry, I’ll describe in detail how to restore a backup of our MySQL dataset in a Cloud Compute VM instance making use of persistent disk snapshots and using code examples that can be used as part of an automation strategy. This method will allow us to switch between datasets in less than a minute, as opposed to the several hours that would be required to perform a restore via xtrabackup, or even longer via mysqldump.

Considerations

I’ve been working in Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and chose a simple master/slave replication scenario consisting of two VM instances running Percona Server 5.7 with xtrabackup installed on the slave.

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