I saw an interesting post about the ability of installing MySQL 5.7 without changing existing tools and procedures. The post is a plea to make MySQL installation frictionless.

That post was followed by a conversation on Twitter, where the recent security enhancements are blamed for getting in the way of existing practices and need a rewrite of installation tools.

I know the problem very well, as I have faced the installation change in MySQL Sandbox. SO I can sympathize with the ones who have to change deployment tools that rely on mysql_install_db, which was a Perl script up to version 5.6, then it was replaced with a C++ program in 5.7 and deprecated in the same version.

It occurred to me that, in order to keep the …

This is a quick post only indirectly related to the series of articles about Docker that I have written recently.

Yesterday I was giving a presentation about Docker in Buenos Aires, and as usual I included a long live demo. Almost all went as expected. There was one step that I tried some time ago, and had always worked well, but when I tried to repeat it on stage, it failed miserably:

• Step 1: run the container

$ docker run  -d --name mybox -e MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=secret mysql/mysql-server …

Among the many New features introduced by MySQL 5.7, we can notice a strong trend towards improving the server security by default. Two features stand out in this respect:

• A password-less root is no longer the default for new installations. Unless you say otherwise, the default installers mysqld --initialize and the deprecated mysql_install_db will generate a random password which the user needs to change.
• The anonymous accounts are no longer created by default. When you start MySQL, you only get the root user (and a new one: read on).

The above features are a great advance not only for security but also for usability. The anonymous users were a continuous source of mismatched connections, …

Previous Episodes:

MySQL-Docker operations. - Part 1: Getting started with MySQL in DockerMySQL-Docker operations. - Part 2: Customizing MySQL in Docker
With the material covered in the first two articles, we have all the elements needed to set up replication in Docker. We just need to put the pieces together.
If you want to do everything by hand, it will only take a few minutes. The steps are not complicated. If you have followed the reasoning in the past episodes, you will know what to do.
Or, you can make your life easier by using the ready-made scripts available in Github as MySQL …

Previous episodes:

• MySQL replication monitoring 101

MySQL replication in action - Part 1: GTID & CoMySQL replication in action - Part 2 - Fan-in topologyMySQL replication in action - Part 3 - All-masters P2P topologyMySQL replication in action - Part 4 - star and hybrid topologies
Parallel replication overviewOne …

I have three pieces of information to share about MySQL::Sandbox:

• Version 3.1.0 has migrated from Launchpad to GitHub
• This version is released under the Apache license. Both these changes are meant to improve and promote cooperation on the project.
• There is an important change related to usability. When using replication with MySQL::Sandbox and MySQL 5.6+, the server UUIDs become more readable (see below).

First, some words on the location changes. About two years ago, I started plans for a rewrite of MySQL::Sandbox. Then, I had some unexpected changes, which involved moving home to a different continent twice within twelve months. The project …

In my latest series of advanced replication features, I came across several usability issues, which I would like to recap here. For each section of this list of requests, I make a wish list, with some general comments.
INSTALLATIONAs the maintainer of MySQL Sandbox, a tool that wants to facilitate the installation of …

Previous episodes:

• MySQL replication monitoring 101

MySQL replication in action - Part 1: GTID & CoMySQL replication in action - Part 2 - Fan-in topology


In the previous article, we saw the basics of establishing replication from multiple origins to the same destination. By extending that concept, we can deploy more complex topologies, such as the point-to-point (P2P) all-masters topology, a robust and …

In the theoretical part of this series, we have seen the basics of monitoring. In that article, though, we have barely mentioned the new tools available in MySQL 5.7 and MariaDB 10. Let’s start from something that has the potential of dramatically changing replication as we know it.
Crash-safe tables and Global transaction identifiers in MySQL 5.6 and 5.7Global transaction identifiers (GTID) is a feature that has been in my wish list for long time, since the times I was working with the MySQL team. By the time I left Oracle, this feature was not even in the plans.
When MySQL 5.6 was first disclosed, the biggest improvement for replication was the introduction of crash-safe tables (see Status persistence in …

The latest MySQL Sandbox, version 3.0.66 is out. It has a few new features (as always, when I find myself doing the same thing many times, I script it) and improved support for latest releases of MySQL. You can now install, among other versions, MySQL 5.7.8 and MariaDB 10.1.x

Some notable additions in this release are in the scripts that are created and customized for each sandbox. There are many of them and when one more arrives, it's easy to overlook it. So, here are the new arrivals.



./show_binlog
When I am troubleshooting replication behavior, I often need to inspect the latest binary log. The sandbox has a shortcut that gives me the right version of mysqlbinlog for the deployment: