Personal blog of Yzmir Ramirez

Join Percona Chief Evangelist Colin Charles as he covers happenings, gives pointers and provides musings on the open source database community.

I think the biggest news from last week was from cPanel – if you haven’t already read the post, please do – on Being a Good Open Source Community Member: Why we hesitated on MySQL 5.7. cPanel anticipated MariaDB being the eventual replacement for MySQL, based on movements from Red Hat, Wikipedia and Google. The advantage focused on transparency around security disclosure, and the added features/improvements. Today though, “MySQL now consistently matches or outpaces MariaDB when it comes to development and releases, which in turn is increasing the demand on us for providing those upgraded versions of MySQL by our users.” And maybe a little more telling, “when MariaDB 10.2 became stable in May 2017 it included many features found in MySQL 5.7. However, MySQL reached stable nearly 18 months earlier in October 2015.” (emphasis mine).

So cPanel is going forth and supporting MySQL 5.7. They will continue supporting MariaDB Server for the foreseeable future. This really is cPanel ensuring they are responsive to users: “The people using and building database-driven applications are doing so with MySQL in mind, and are hesitant to add support for MariaDB. Responding to our community’s desires is one of the most important things to us, and this is something that we are hearing asked for from our community consistently.”

I, of course, think this is a great move. Users deserve choice. And MySQL has features that are sometimes still not included in MariaDB Server. Have you seen the Complete list of new features in MySQL 5.7? Or my high-level response to a MariaDB Corporation white paper?

I can only hope to see more people think pragmatically like cPanel. Ubuntu as a Linux distribution still does – you get MySQL 5.7 as a default (very unlike the upstream Debian which ships MariaDB Server nowadays). I used to be a proponent of MariaDB Server being everywhere, when it was community-developed, feature-enhanced, and backward-compatible. However, the moment it stopped being a branch and a true fork is the moment where trouble lies for users. I think it was still marginally fine with 10.0, and maybe even 10.1, but the ability to maintain feature parity with enhanced features has long gone. Short of a rebase? But then… what would be different to the already popular branch of MySQL called Percona Server for MySQL?

While there are wins and support from cloud vendors, like Amazon AWS RDS and Microsoft Azure, you’ll notice that they offer both MySQL and MariaDB Server. Google Cloud SQL notably only offers MySQL. IBM may be a sponsor of the MariaDB Foundation, but I don’t see their services like Compose offering anything other than MySQL (with group replication nonetheless!). Platinum member Alibaba Cloud offers MySQL and PostgreSQL. However, Tencent seems to suggest that MariaDB is coming soon? One interesting statistic to watch would be user uptake naturally.

Events

From an events standpoint, the Percona Live 2018 Call for Papers has been extended to January 12, 2018. We expect an early announcement of maybe ten talks in the week of  January 5. Please submit to the CFP. Have you got your tickets yet? Nab them during our Percona Live 2018 super saver registration when they are the best price!

FOSDEM has got Sveta and myself speaking in the MySQL and Friends DevRoom, but we also have good news in the sense that Peter Zaitsev is also going to be at FOSDEM – speaking in the main track. We’ll also have plenty of schwag at the stand.

I think it’s important to take note of the updates to Percona bug tracking: yes, its Jira all the way. Would be good for everyone to start also looking at how the sausage is made.

Dragph, a “distributed fast graph database“, just raised $3m and released 1.0. Have you used it?

On a lighter note, there seems to be a tweet going around by many, so I thought I’d share it here. Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays.

He’s making a database
He’s sorting it twice
SELECT * FROM girls_boys WHERE behaviour = “nice”
SQL Claus is coming to town!

Releases

• Percona Monitoring and Management 1.5.3
• ProxySQL 1.4.4 – some interesting features include bandwidth throttling, limit connections to backends, monitoring replication lag, and more.
• MariaDB Server 10.2 is in CentOS 6 and CentOS 7 via Software Collections.

Link List

• Good presentation on multi-user Presto usage.
• You probably must be dabbling with containers, so Google released container-diff, a tool for quickly comparing container images. Check it out on GitHub.
• James Governor (RedMonk), writes On AWS and Pivotal, opinions and overlaps.
• That time Larry Ellison allegedly tried to have a professor fired for benchmarking Oracle
• Apache Cassandra users, should you use incremental repair?

Upcoming appearances

• FOSDEM 2018 – Brussels, Belgium – February 3-4 2018
• SCALE16x – Pasadena, California, USA – March 8-11 2018

Feedback

I look forward to feedback/tips via e-mail at colin.charles@percona.com or on Twitter @bytebot.

In this blog post, we’ll look at how to replace MySQL with Percona Server for MySQL on a CPanel, WHM VPS or dedicated server.

In general, CPanel and WHM have been leaning towards support of MariaDB over other flavors. This is partly due to the upstream repos replacing the MySQL package with MariaDB (for example, on CentOS).

MySQL 5.6 is still supported though, which means they are keeping support for core MySQL products. But if you want to get some extra performance enhancements or enterprise features for free, without getting too many bells and whistles, you might want to install Percona Server.

I’ve done this work on a new dedicated server with the latest WHM and CPanel on CentOS 7, with MySQL 5.6 installed. Besides the backup, this is a fairly quick process.

It’s pretty simple. From the Percona Server for MySQL 5.7 installation doc, we can get the YUM repo. (Run commands as root if you can, otherwise as sudo.)

yum install http://www.percona.com/downloads/percona-release/redhat/0.1-3/percona-release-0.1-3.noarch.rpm

Now that we have the repo, let’s install Percona XtraBackup in case we need to roll this back at any point:

yum install percona-xtrabackup

This server had a drive mounted at /backup, so I created the backup with the following commands:

xtrabackup --target-dir=/backup/xtrabackup --backup
xtrabackup --target-dir=/backup/xtrabackup --prepare

Now that we have a good backup, let’s remove MySQL:

service mysql stop
yum remove MySQL* mysql*

Depending on your dependency chain, this could remove Percona XtraBackup, but that can be fixed. Let’s accept this uninstall.

Let’s install Percona Server for MySQL 5.7 and Percona Toolkit:

yum install Percona-Server-server-57 percona-toolkit percona-xtrabackup

Now that it’s installed ensure the mysql service is running. If it isn’t, start it. Now let’s upgrade:

mysql_upgrade

NOTE. This works if you can log in as root without a password; if you can’t, you will need to specify the

-u

 and

-p

 flags.

Once you run the upgrade, restart the mysql service:

service mysql restart

And there you go, you are now running on Percona Server for MySQL 5.7. If your managed providers tell you it’s not supported, don’t worry! It works as long as CPanel supports MySQL 5.6.

If you have any issues, just restore the backup.

NOTE: One thing to keep in mind is that 5.7 breaks CPanel’s ability to create users in MySQL. I believe this is due to the changes to the mysql.user table. If this is an issue for you, you can always use Percona Server for MySQL 5.6.