Database Technology

Percona highlights MySQL 9.7 as a new Long-Term Support release designed to replace the End-of-Life MySQL 8.0. The update introduces features across multiple technical domains aimed at enhancing operational stability. The release is positioned as the next stable foundation for production workloads following the previous LTS cycle.

• MySQL 8.0 has reached End-of-Life, making 9.7 the recommended LTS path.
• Release focuses on enhanced stability for long-term production deployments.
• Feature set spans multiple technical domains within the MySQL environment.
• Percona provides evaluation of practical utility for database administrators.

LakeQuest is a 9,846-pair benchmark designed to evaluate question answering systems on noisy, weakly structured data lakes rather than clean corpora. It spans AI/ML metadata, retail banking, and biomedical domains, requiring models to navigate heterogeneous tables and linked metadata. The benchmark focuses on the full retrieve-and-synthesize pipeline, addressing the gap where current tests ignore the complexity of real-world data discovery.

• Evaluates end-to-end performance over heterogeneous, weakly structured data rather than clean schemas.
• Covers three distinct domains: AI/ML metadata, retail banking, and biomedical drug information.
• Requires systems to handle noisy discovery of tables, passages, and linked metadata.
• Human-validated pairs ensure realistic assessment of retrieve-and-synthesize pipelines.

AWS has expanded Amazon Aurora DSQL availability to the Europe (Spain) Region, supporting single-Region clusters. This serverless distributed SQL database offers active-active high availability and multi-Region strong consistency. It is designed to provide virtually unlimited scalability and zero infrastructure management for always-available applications.

• Aurora DSQL is now live in Europe (Spain) for single-Region deployments.
• Features include active-active HA and multi-Region strong consistency.
• Serverless architecture eliminates infrastructure management overhead.
• Enables effortless scaling and resilience for distributed SQL workloads.
• Expands the global footprint of fast, serverless distributed SQL capabilities.

With pgAgent on its way out, Regina Obe is guiding the migration to pg_timetable by detailing how to install it as a Linux service. This second part of the series focuses on the operational configuration required to run the scheduler reliably. Obe is also developing a pg_timetable UI for pgAdmin that mirrors the familiar pgAgent interface to ease the transition for users.

• pgAgent is being deprecated, making pg_timetable the recommended replacement for job scheduling.
• New guidance is available for installing pg_timetable as a persistent Linux service.
• A pgAdmin UI for pg_timetable is in development to replicate the existing pgAgent experience.
• The new UI pull request is currently being cleaned up before final commit.

The Odyssey connection pooler for PostgreSQL and Apache Cloudberry has reached version 1.5.1, bringing extended protocol support and performance improvements for pipelining. New capabilities include shared pools, transaction pooling pinning, and explicit CPU affinity support. The release also adds observability features like queue time metrics, Prometheus exporter enhancements, and SSLKEYLOGFILE support.

• Improves pipelining performance and fixes protocol violations for better stability.
• Adds queue time metrics (avg/total wait) and pool_notice_after_waiting_ms for debugging.
• Supports CPU affinity and shared pools for more granular resource control.
• Includes SSLKEYLOGFILE support to aid in TLS traffic analysis and debugging.