The year 2020 has started eventfully, and it continues to present challenging times for people, businesses, and economies around the world. As our CEO Satya Nadella puts it, “We have seen two years of digital transformation in two months.” Azure Database for MySQL service is at the heart of this transformation, empowering online education, video streaming services, digital payment solutions, e-commerce platforms, gaming services, news portals, government and healthcare websites to support unprecedented growth at optimized cost. It’s immensely satisfying to see Azure Database for MySQL enable our customers to meet growing demands for their services during these critical times. Azure Database for MySQL service, with community version of MySQL, is powering mission critical services such as healthcare services for citizens of Denmark, digital payment application for citizens of Hong Kong, music and video streaming platforms for citizens of India, Korea, and Japan, online news websites, and mobile gaming services including our very own Minecraft Realms.
MySQL is a popular choice of database engine for designing internet scale consumer applications, which are highly transactional online applications with short chatty transactions against a relatively small database size. These applications are typically developed in Java or php and migrated to run on Azure virtual machine scale sets (VMSS) or Azure App Services or are containerized to run on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). The database is typically required to scale high volume of incoming transactions. Most of our customers leverage proxysql load balancer proxy and read replicas to scale out and meet the workload demands for their business. MySQL versions 5.7 and 8.0 continue to be popular choices among our customers for meeting their performance and scale goals.
Over the last six months, we’ve focused on enhancing security and governance for customers, simplifying performance tuning, and reducing cost for our customers in addition to increasing the regional availability of our optimized large storage platform with 16-TB storage and 20K IOPs scale. This aligns with our promise of making Azure the most secure and trusted cloud for our customers. A complete list of all the features we’ve released is available via Azure updates, but I’ll summarize a few important updates below.
We’ve created an Azure Policy GitHub repository that contains quick-start samples from the community. For more information about using these sample policies, see the article here.
Besides the security controls, the engineering team focused on making life easier for devops team who are tasked to manage the performance of large fleet of servers. Intelligent performance is our differentiated feature which includes query store, query performance insight, and performance recommendations. Intelligent performance allows devops teams to better understand their workloads, visually inspect them and identify bottlenecks, and to see a list of recommendations for improving the performance of database workloads.
For some canonical workloads like WordPress, we are taking a step forward to allow users to configure an optimized performance configuration for their Azure Database for MySQL server using resource tags. To take advantage of this feature and drive performance optimizations for WordPress applications, users can simply set the following resource tag on Azure Database for MySQL server used for WordPress application at time of server creation. Learn more about this feature here.
We are constantly using pattern analysis to programmatically analyze metrics telemetry of servers and provide targeted Advisor recommendation which can enable users to improve performance of their MySQL servers out of the box without any code changes. The recent recommendation which we added is to increase tmp_table_size and max_heap_table_size values for servers which are impacted by temp tables spills to storage. The increase in the server parameter values for those impacted servers can improve overall workload performance out of the box. For Azure Database for MySQL servers impacted by temp table spills to storage, customers will see the recommendation to increase the values in Advisor recommendation blade in the portal. Learn the latest about this feature here.
As scale demands of the workload increases, customers can leverage read replicas to scale-out and proxysql to transparently split the reads and writes from the application. In some scenarios, there may still be high amount of thread churn inside the server with short burst of highly concurrent transactions limiting the transaction throughput due to high cpu contention. To minimize this and improve the performance out of the box, we released thread pool feature which can be enabled using server parameters in Azure Database for MySQL service. Learn more about this feature here.
Reducing cost is top in the mind of customers and therefore, it is a top priority for us too. We released few features in this area to ensure customers are provisioning the right size for their workloads and benefit from capacity commitments. This is an active area of investment for us and we are committed to do more in this area so please stay tuned.
Large Storage with up to 16TB storage. With our new storage infrastructure that supports up to 16TB, we have done bunch of optimizations in the storage engine including switching to snapshot-based backups. The 16 TB storage also supports IOPs up to 20K IOPs for higher concurrent scaling. In a subset of Azure regions, all newly provisioned servers can support up to 16-TB storage and 20K IOPs. We are also working towards rolling out this storage infrastructure in remaining Azure regions which will be the default storage option going forward.
Users new to Azure Database for MySQL can get started by leveraging the following QuickStart articles:
The connection to Azure Database for MySQL requires users to specify the username in the format username@servername. For more information on this requirement, read more here.
Customers looking to migrate their database to Azure Database for MySQL can use the
To migrate users from an existing environment to a Azure Database for MySQL server, leverage the script documented here.
If you want to get alerted for upcoming planned maintenance to your Azure Database for MySQL server, we recommend subscribing to planned maintenance notification. Learn more about this feature here.
To stay updated around the latest development with Azure Database for MySQL service, we recommend the following:
We are constantly looking at ways to improve our service and prioritize highly requested items. If you have any feedback, you can leverage the following forums:
If our documentation fails to provide clarity, we encourage customers to contact us with questions.
For support with an existing Azure Database for MySQL server, use the Azure portal to open a support request with us.
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