Important
This repo has moved. These skills have been merged into the consolidated, org-maintained pack at Percona-Lab/skills — one authoritative home for Percona agent skills, covering the MySQL ecosystem here plus MongoDB, PostgreSQL, the Kubernetes Operators, and the percona-dk MCP. Please install, file issues, and send PRs there from now on:
npx skills add Percona-Lab/skills
The author of this repo co-maintains the imported MySQL skills there. This repo is kept for history and will not receive further updates.
Short SKILL.md briefings for AI coding agents — so they get right what they often get wrong about Percona Server for MySQL and the wider Percona ecosystem (XtraBackup, Toolkit, XtraDB Cluster, PMM, and the Kubernetes Operators). Skills install on the AI agent, not on your database server.
A skill is a curated markdown file the agent reads when a topic matches. Think of it as a briefing note: Percona-specific guidance, common LLM mistakes, and pointers to docs.percona.com. Skills work with Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, OpenAI Codex, and other agent tools.
Skills use wrong/right pairs, version annotations, and links to official documentation so agents can tailor advice to the Percona version you run.
Percona Server for MySQL is a true drop-in replacement for the matching Oracle MySQL release — so agents that know MySQL are already 95% correct on syntax. The gap is everything Percona adds: extra instrumentation, encryption, and the operational tooling agents don't know exists, plus a few hard rules they routinely miss (XtraBackup version-matching, PXC's primary-key requirement, MySQL 8.4 removed syntax). These skills close that gap.
What Percona Server adds over stock MySQL: User Statistics, the extended slow query log, threadpool, extra encryption and the Vault keyring, the Audit Log Filter, MyRocks, backup locks, and kill-idle-transaction — the things agents rarely suggest unprompted.
Adopting or migrating to Percona Server from community MySQL or MariaDB. Why it's a true drop-in (unlike MariaDB), the same-major package swap, and the upstream MySQL 8.4 breaking changes (removed SHOW SLAVE STATUS, caching_sha2_password default) it inherits.
Hot, non-blocking physical backups. Strict version matching (PXB major must equal server major), the mandatory --prepare step, incrementals, compression, encryption, streaming, and PXC backups.
The pt-* tools: pt-online-schema-change (vs native INSTANT DDL), pt-query-digest, pt-archiver, pt-table-checksum/pt-table-sync, pt-stalk, pt-kill, pt-heartbeat — and the safety flags agents skip.
Synchronous multi-master HA with Galera. Primary-key requirement, InnoDB-only replication, certification conflicts at COMMIT, SST/IST, quorum, pxc_strict_mode, and TOI-vs-RSU schema changes.
Diagnosing slow queries and designing indexes using Percona Server's extra instrumentation — userstat, the extended slow log, pt-query-digest, PMM QAN — plus EXPLAIN ANALYZE, histograms, and invisible indexes.
Open-source database observability (PMM): client/server architecture, install and registration, and Query Analytics — including the slow-log-vs-Performance-Schema choice and PMM 2 vs 3.
Running MySQL on Kubernetes. The two distinct operators (PXC-based vs Percona-Server-based), choosing between them, the cluster Custom Resource, scaling, and backups to S3/GCS/Azure.
The non-Galera HA options: asynchronous and GTID replication, semi-synchronous, and Group Replication — how to choose, set up, and monitor them, plus the 8.4 SOURCE/REPLICA syntax. (Galera lives in percona-xtradb-cluster.)
Data-at-rest encryption and keyring management: the master-key hierarchy, encrypting tablespaces / binlogs / redo-undo / temp files, the file/Vault/KMIP/AWS-KMS keyrings, and master-key rotation.
The open-source Audit Log Filter: installing the component, the JSON filter rule DSL, assigning filters to users, and log formats/rotation/encryption.
Masking PII and generating synthetic test data with the open-source masking component: the mask_*/gen_* functions, dictionaries, and why it is a presentation layer, not access control.
Writing stored procedures and functions in JavaScript via the js_lang component (tech preview): syntax, privileges, the SQL↔JS type mapping, and the sandbox limits.
Migrating from Oracle Database. Why it is a true rewrite (no Oracle-compatibility mode, unlike MariaDB), data-type mapping, and rewriting PL/SQL, sequences, ROWNUM, and CONNECT BY.
Use npx skills for an interactive install — choose which Percona skills to install and which agents on your system (Claude, Cursor, Codex, etc.):
npx skills add EvgeniyPatlan/percona-mysql-skills
Or install one skill:
npx skills add EvgeniyPatlan/percona-mysql-skills/<skill-name>
Replace <skill-name> with e.g. percona-xtrabackup or mysql-to-percona-server.
Download SKILL.md into the agent's skill folder, for example:
mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills/<skill-name>
curl -o ~/.claude/skills/<skill-name>/SKILL.md \
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/EvgeniyPatlan/percona-mysql-skills/main/<skill-name>/SKILL.md- Claude Code and Claude Desktop:
~/.claude/skills/<skill-name>/SKILL.md - OpenAI Codex:
~/.agents/skills/<skill-name>/SKILL.md
Once installed, skills activate automatically. When your question matches a skill's topic, the agent reads it and applies the guidance for that session. No manual activation is needed.
Open for improvements and more skills. Contributions and feedback welcome via pull requests.