Introduction/TLDR:

We are considering changing EXPLAIN in Percona Server for MySQL to require less privileges for providing execution plans for INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE statements (and possibly changing the behavior for EXPLAIN SELECT as well), to make it more convenient and safer to use with monitoring and query analysis tools. We would like to get feedback from the Community about the different approaches for achieving this.

The problem:

Running EXPLAIN is a great way to understand how complex SQL statements are executed. So it is natural that monitoring and query analysis tools utilize EXPLAIN for these purposes.

However, there is a problem for cases when INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE statements need to be explained. Running EXPLAIN for these statements, a read-only operation, requires the same privileges as running the original statements …

Percona Server for MySQL 8.0.30-22 introduces a new authentication plugin, named authentication_fido. With this new plugin, it is possible to perform multi-factor authentication using hardware keys, or single-factor passwordless authentication with the same keys. This new plugin is in technical preview.

The plugin works exactly the same as the MySQL Enterprise FIDO authentication plugin, which is documented in detail in the official MySQL documentation and in the Percona Server for MySQL documentation

To try …

Percona Server for MySQL 8.0.30-22 introduces several improvements for the LDAP plugin: SASL support, support for fallback servers, and support for LDAP-based authorization. All improvements are in technical preview.

A description of the existing plugin features and usage instructions are available in the earlier blog post introducing the LDAP simple plugin, and in the Percona Server for MySQL documentation.

SASL connections

We introduced a new plugin similar to the MySQL …

In this blog post, I will try to cover a few dump and data-loading utilities offered by MySQL Shell.

What is MySQL Shell?

It is a robust client and code editor for MySQL. In addition to having APIs for dealing with MySQL, MySQL Shell offers scripting capabilities for JavaScript and Python. It provides an AdminAPI to manage MySQL servers and create InnoDB Cluster and ReplicaSet deployments. It supports an X DevAPI to work on both SQL and NoSQL interfaces via the X Protocol. Finally, it provides utilities to make working with MySQL in Python and Javascript mode easier.

Now, let’s jump into some practical stuff and see what these tools offer us.

Dump Utility

In the dump utility, there are three tools: util.dumpInstance(), util.dumpSchemas(), and util.dumpTables () so let’s discuss them one by one. 

1.  “util.dumpInstance()” – This was introduced in MySQL Shell 8.0.21 and …

Raspberry PI is a small single-board computer (SBCs) developed by the Raspberry Pi Foundation in association with Broadcom. This tiny computer is extremely popular and widely used in many areas. Thanks to its size, low cost, and low energy requirements, it can be used to collect data in remote locations or from sensor devices. We often need to be able to store large amounts of data efficiently on these devices.

MyRocks is a MySQL engine that uses RocksDB to store data. It is space efficient and able to handle writes quite efficiently.

First things first

Building and installing Percona Server for MySQL with MyRocks engine enabled is easy but requires some time. It is essential to make sure that you have all the ingredients and meet all the requirements:

• Raspberry PI 3, 4, 400, or superior.
• SD Card with …

Are you familiar with the UNION statement for your SQL queries? Most likely, you are. It has been supported for a long time.

In case you are not familiar with UNION, don’t worry, I’m going to show you how it works with simple examples.

Considering “Set Theory”, other than the UNION, starting from the newly deployed MySQL Community 8.0.31, a couple of new clauses are available: INTERSECT and EXCEPT.

From now on you can rely on more powerful options to write your queries and deploy some Set Theory logic.

In this article, I’m going to present how the three options work.

The traditional UNION

UNION combines the results from two or multiple SELECT statements into a single result set. Let’s suppose you have two queries, A and B, they return the same number of columns with the same data types and you need to merge all rows from both queries into a single result set. You can …

In Percona Server for MySQL 8.0.29-21, we added one more patch that helps us to build server code on macOS. To be precise here, we still could do this even before this patch but only partially. Now it is possible to build RocksDB Storage Engine as well.

A word of disclaimer here, at the moment, by macOS we still understand macOS for Intel x86_64 architecture (the most recent ARM versions with Apple M1 / M2 processors are out of the scope of this blog post). Moreover, Percona does not provide …

There are two Operators at Percona to deploy MySQL on Kubernetes:

• one is based on Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC), production-ready and widely adopted
• another is based on Percona Server for MySQL, now in tech preview and not recommended for production yet

We wrote a blog post in the past explaining the thought process and reasoning behind creating the new Operator for MySQL. The goal for us is to provide production-grade solutions to run MySQL in Kubernetes and support various replication configurations:

• Synchronous replication
  …

Percona Server for MySQL 8.0.28-20 introduces a new keyring component, component_keyring_kms, which allows using the AWS Key Management Service as a keyring. The component is also included in Percona XtraBackup 8.0.28, allowing backing up databases encrypted with this component.

The feature is similar to the AWS keyring plugin included in MySQL Enterprise, but it is implemented as a component instead, and because of that, it requires a different configuration.

Configuring AWS KMS

The component uses a single Master Key on KMS, which has to be created manually before configuring the component. This key can also be changed later, and existing keys using the old key will remain usable, as long as the key still exists …

Imagine you need to design an online system for storing documents on a per-user basis where nobody, including database administrators, would be able to change the content of those documents without being noticed by document owners.

In Percona Server for MySQL 8.0.28-20, we added a new component called Encryption UDFs – an open-source alternative to MySQL Enterprise Encryption that allows users to access a number of low-level OpenSSL encryption primitives directly from MySQL. This includes calculating digests (with a great variety of hash functions), asymmetric key generation (RSA, …