Managing farms of MySQL servers under a replication environment is very efficient with the help of a MySQL orchestrator tool. This ensures a smooth transition happens when there is any ad hoc failover or a planned/graceful switchover comes into action. Several configuration parameters play a crucial role in controlling and influencing failover behavior. In this […]

As we know, Orchestrator is a MySQL high availability and replication management tool that aids in managing farms of MySQL servers. In this blog post, we discuss how to make the Orchestrator (which manages MySQL) itself fault-tolerant and highly available. When considering HA for the Orchestrator one of the popular choices will be using the Raft consensus. […]

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

Percona Live Santa Clara 2018 update: tutorials have been picked, and the schedule/press release should be announced by next week. We’ve (the committee) rated over 300+ talks, and easily 70% of the schedule should go live next week as well.

There’s a lot happening for FOSDEM this week — so expect a longer report of some sort next week.

A friend, Yanwei Zhou, DBA at Qunar in China, gave an excellent presentation in Chinese on how they use Percona Toolkit. Check it out:

Are you on Twitter? Hope you’re following the @planetmysql account.

Releases

• Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.7.20-29.24 – new features, bug fixes, and a base of Percona Server 5.7.20-18.
• orchestrator 3.0.6 – faster failure detection, faster master recoveries, semi-sync support, and more. This is getting to be a real interesting release.
• MariaDB Server 10.0.34 – new XtraDB, InnoDB, TokuDB, and even PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA. Security and InnoDB fixes as well.
• Percona Server for MySQL 5.5.59-38.11 – bug fixes

Link List

• Considering the Community Effects of Introducing an Official MongoDB Go Driver – What do you do when an open-source project you rely on no longer meets your needs? When your choice affects not just you, but a larger community, what principles guide your decision?
• Postgres Indexes Under the Hood
• It’s About Time For Time Series Databases
• Database Design Decisions for Multi-Version Concurrency Control
• How to convert galera node to async slave and vice-versa with MariaDB Galera Cluster.
• DO or UNDO – there is no VACUUM – really important article from a PostgreSQL standpoint. Recommended read.
• Optimising graph lookups in MongoDB

Upcoming appearances

• CentOS Dojo Brussels – Brussels, Belgium – February 2 2018
• 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.

Welcome to another post our series of interview blogs for the upcoming Percona Live Europe 2017 in Dublin. This series highlights a number of talks that will be at the conference and gives a short preview of what attendees can expect to learn from the presenter.

This blog post is with Avraham Apelbaum, DBA and DevOps at Wix.com His talk is titled Orchestrating ProxySQL with Orchestrator and Consul. The combination of ProxySQL and Orchestrator solves many problems, but still requires some manual labor when the configuration changes when there is a network split (and other scenarios). In our conversation, we discussed using Consul to solve some of these issues:

Percona: How did you get into database technology? What do you love about it?

Avraham: On my first day as a soldier in a technology unit of the IDF, I received a HUGE Oracle 8 book and a very low-level design of a DB-based system. “You have one month,” they told me. I finished it all within ten days. Before that, I didn’t even know what a DB was. Today, I’m at Wix managing hundreds of databases that support 100M users!

Percona: You’re presenting a session called “Orchestrating ProxySQL with Orchestrator and Consul”. How do these technologies work together to help provide a high availability solution?

Avraham: ProxySQL is supposed to help you out with high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) for MySQL servers, but it still requires some manual labor when the configuration changes – as a result of a network split, for example. Somehow all ProxySQL servers need to get the new MySQL cluster topology. So to automate all that, I added two more parts: a Consul KV store and a Consul template, which are responsible for updating ProxySQL on every architecture change in the MySQL cluster.

Percona: What is special about this combination of products that works better than other solutions? Is it right all the time, or does it depend on the workload?

Avraham: As DevOps I prefer not to do anything manually. What’s more, no one wants to wake up in the middle of the night because any one of our DB servers can fail. Most everyone, I guess, will have more than one ProxySQL server in their system at some point, so this solution can help them use ProxySql and Orchestrator.

Percona: What do you want attendees to take away from your session? Why should they attend?

Avraham: I am hoping to help people automate their HA and DR solutions. If as a result of my talk someone will earn even one minute off downtime, I’ll be happy.

Percona: What are you most looking forward to at Percona Live Europe 2017?

Avraham: In the DevOps and open source world, it’s all about sharing ideas. It was actually when I attended the talks by ProxySQL and Orchestrator’s creators that I thought of assembling it all up to solve our own problem. So I am looking forward to sharing my idea with others, and getting input from the audience so that everyone can benefit.

Want to find out more about Avraham and RDS migration? Register for Percona Live Europe 2017, and see his talk Orchestrating ProxySQL with Orchestrator and Consul. Register now to get the best price! Use discount code SeeMeSpeakPLE17 to get 10% off your registration.

Percona Live Open Source Database Conference Europe 2017 in Dublin is the premier European open source event for the data performance ecosystem. It is the place to be for the open source community as well as businesses that thrive in the MySQL, MariaDB, MongoDB, time series database, cloud, big data and Internet of Things (IoT) marketplaces. Attendees include DBAs, sysadmins, developers, architects, CTOs, CEOs, and vendors from around the world.

The Percona Live Open Source Database Conference Europe will be September 25-27, 2017 at the Radisson Blu Royal Hotel, Dublin.

Percona announces the release of Percona Monitoring and Management 1.2.0 on July 14, 2017.

For installation instructions, see the Deployment Guide.

Percona announces the release of Percona Monitoring and Management 1.1.5 on June 21, 2017.

For installation instructions, see the Deployment Guide.

Percona announces the release of Percona Monitoring and Management 1.1.4 on May 29, 2017.

For installation instructions, see the Deployment Guide.

This release includes experimental support for MongoDB in Query Analytics, including updated QAN interface.

sudo pmm-admin add --dev-enable mongodb:queries

About Percona Monitoring and Management

Percona Monitoring and Management is an open-source platform for managing and monitoring MySQL and MongoDB performance. Percona developed it in collaboration with experts in the field of managed database services, support and consulting.

PMM is a free and open-source solution that you can run in your own environment for maximum security and reliability. It provides thorough time-based analysis for MySQL and MongoDB servers to ensure that your data works as efficiently as possible.

A live demo of PMM is available at pmmdemo.percona.com.

Please provide your feedback and questions on the PMM forum.

Percona announces the release of Percona Monitoring and Management 1.1.3 on April 21, 2017.

For installation instructions, see the Deployment Guide.

This release includes several new graphs in dashboards related to InnoDB and MongoDB operation, as well as smaller fixes and improvements.

New in PMM Server

• PMM-649: Added the InnoDB Page Splits and InnoDB Page Reorgs graphs to the MySQL InnoDB Metrics Advanced dashboard.
• Added the following graphs to the MongoDB ReplSet dashboard:
  • Oplog Getmore Time
  • Oplog Operations
  • Oplog Processing Time
  • Oplog Buffered Operations
  • Oplog Buffer Capacity
• Added descriptions for graphs in the following dashboards:
  • MongoDB Overview
  • MongoDB ReplSet
  • PMM Demo

Changes in PMM Client

• PMM-491: Improved pmm-admin error messages.
• PMM-523: Added the --verbose option for pmm-admin add.
• PMM-592: Added the --force option for pmm-admin stop.
• PMM-702: Added the db.serverStatus().metrics.repl.executor stats to mongodb_exporter. These new stats will be used for graphs in future releases.
• PMM-731: Added real-time checks to pmm-admin check-network output.
• The following commands no longer require connection to PMM Server:
  • pmm-admin start --all
  • pmm-admin stop --all
  • pmm-admin restart --all
  • pmm-admin show-passwords

  NOTE: If you want to start, stop, or restart a specific service, connection to PMM Server is still required.

About Percona Monitoring and Management

Percona Monitoring and Management is an open-source platform for managing and monitoring MySQL and MongoDB performance. Percona developed it in collaboration with experts in the field of managed database services, support and consulting.

PMM is a free and open-source solution that you can run in your own environment for maximum security and reliability. It provides thorough time-based analysis for MySQL and MongoDB servers to ensure that your data works as efficiently as possible.

A live demo of PMM is available at pmmdemo.percona.com.

Please provide your feedback and questions on the PMM forum.

Percona announces the release of Percona Monitoring and Management 1.1.2 on April 3, 2017.

For installation instructions, see the Deployment Guide.

This release includes several new dashboards in Metrics Monitor, updated versions of software components used in PMM Server, and a number of small bug fixes.

Thank You to the Community!

We would like to mention some of the key contributors in this release, and thank the community for continued support of PMM:

• tcaxias for fixing our Docker deployment so that supervisor is PID 1
• pschultz who helped us improve the Disk Performance and Percona XtraDB Cluster graphs to better leverage Grafana tooltips
• Andrii Skomorokhov from Percona for fixing the Grafana tooltip bug #7708
• Tim Vaillancourt from Percona for a number of improvements to mongodb_exporter

New Dashboards and Graphs

This release includes the following new dashboards:

• MongoDB MMAPv1 dashboard provides insight for the MMAPv1 storage engine:

• MongoDB InMemory dashboard includes graphs related to the InMemory storage engine:

• MariaDB dashboard includes three new graphs for the Aria storage engine. There will be a detailed blog post about monitoring possibilities with these new graphs:

The new MariaDB dashboard also includes three new graphs for monitoring InnoDB within MariaDB. We are planning to move them into one of the existing InnoDB dashboards in the next PMM release:

• The InnoDB Defragmentation graph shows how OPTIMIZE TABLE impacts defragmentation on tables when running MariaDB with innodb_file_per_table=1 and innodb_defragment=1.

• The InnoDB Online DDL graph includes metrics related to online DDL operations when using ALTER TABLE ... ALGORITHM=INPLACE in MariaDB.

• The InnoDB Deadlocks Detected graph currently works only with MariaDB 10.1. We are planning to add support for MariaDB 10.2, Percona Server, and MySQL in the next PMM release.

• The Index Condition Pushdown graph shows how InnoDB leverages the Index Condition Pushdown (ICP) routines. Currently this graph works only with MariaDB, but we are planning to add support for Percona Server and MySQL in the next PMM release.

Updated Software

PMM is based on several third-party open-source software components. We ensure that PMM includes the latest versions of these components in every release, making it the most secure, stable and feature-rich database monitoring platform possible. Here are some highlights of changes in the latest releases:

• Grafana 4.2 (from 4.1.1)
  • HipChat integration
  • Templating improvements
  • Alerting enhancements
• Consul 0.7.5 (from 0.7.3)
  • Bug fix for serious server panic
• Prometheus 1.5.2 (from 1.5.1)
  • Prometheus binaries are built with Go1.7.5
  • Fixed two panic conditions and one series corruption bug
• Orchestrator 2.0.3 (from 2.0.1)
  • GTID improvements
  • Logging enhancements
  • Improved timing resolution and faster discoveries

Other Changes in PMM Server

• Migrated the PMM Server docker container to use CentOS 7 as the base operating system.
• Changed the entry point so that supervisor is PID 1.
• PMM-633: Set the following default values in my.cnf:

  [mysqld]
  # Default MySQL Settings
  innodb_buffer_pool_size=128M
  innodb_log_file_size=5M
  innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit=1
  innodb_file_per_table=1
  innodb_flush_method=O_DIRECT
  # Disable Query Cache by default
  query_cache_size=0
  query_cache_type=0

• PMM-676: Added descriptions for graphs in Disk Performance and Galera dashboards.

Changes in PMM Client

• Fixed pmm-admin remove --all to clear all saved credentials.
• Several fixes to mongodb_exporter including PMM-629 and PMM-642.
• PMM-504: Added ability to change the name of a client with running services:

  $ sudo pmm-admin config --client-name new_name --force

  WARNING: Some Metrics Monitor data may be lost when renaming a running client.

About Percona Monitoring and Management

Percona Monitoring and Management is an open-source platform for managing and monitoring MySQL and MongoDB performance. Percona developed it in collaboration with experts in the field of managed database services, support and consulting.

PMM is a free and open-source solution that you can run in your own environment for maximum security and reliability. It provides thorough time-based analysis for MySQL and MongoDB servers to ensure that your data works as efficiently as possible.

A live demo of PMM is available at pmmdemo.percona.com.

Please provide your feedback and questions on the PMM forum.

We are excited to announce that the sneak peek schedule for the Percona Live 2017 Open Source Database Conference is up! The Percona Live Open Source Database Conference 2017 is April 24th – 27th, at the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara & The Santa Clara Convention Center.

The Percona Live Open Source Database Conference 2017 is the premier event for the rich and diverse MySQL, MongoDB and open source database ecosystems. This conference provides an opportunity to network with peers and technology professionals by bringing together accomplished DBA’s, system architects and developers from around the world to share their knowledge and experience.

Below are some of our top picks for MySQL, MongoDB and open source database sessions:

Tutorials