Security features overview

One of Oracle's tenets is the focus on security. For this reason, when it took over the stewardship of MySQL, it started addressing the most common issues. It was not quick acting, but we have seen real progress:

1. MySQL 5.7 has removed the anonymous accounts, which was the greatest threat to security. Because of those accounts, and the default privileges granted to them, users without any privileges could access the "test" database and do serious damage. Additionally, because of the way the privilege engine evaluates accounts, anonymous users could hijack legitimate users, by preventing them to work …

I’ve been lately compiling and generating .deb packages for several MySQL and MariaDB recent versions, and I wanted to try them more in depth -specially MySQL 8.0 and MariaDB 10.2, both of which are still in development.

Several people have already given their first impressions (or will do soon), and testing early is the best way to catch bugs and regressions, and get them fixed before the official release. In fact, as I will comment later, I ran into breaking bugs on both MySQL 8.0 and MariaDB 10.2, which I …

With Oracle Open World behind us, we are now getting ready for the next big event, i.e. the European edition of PerconaLive. I am going to be a presenter three times:

• MySQL operations in Docker is a three-hour tutorial, and it will be an expansion of the talk by the same title presented at OOW. Attendees who want to play along can do it, by coming prepared with Docker 1.11 or later and the following images already pulled (images with [+] are mandatory, while [-] are optional):

  …

MySQL is a growing presence at Oracle Open World. While most of the headlines belong to the main products, where Oracle services are aiming at world domination, MySQL shared the spotlight, as it was announced to be part of Oracle database cloud. It seems a logical move for Oracle: after all the effort to make MySQL 5.7 the biggest release ever, it stands to reason that it is offered as a competitive feature in its own database as a service.

With this offer, Oracle is applying enterprise pricing and methodologies to a target of emerging companies. MySQL in the Oracle cloud differs from the competition by a few key points:

• It's only MySQL 5.7. While this is the most advanced MySQL server …

Now that MySQL 8.0 has been revealed, it's time to take a deep look at replication features in the latest releases, and review its overall design.

Server UUID vs Server-ID

At the beginning of replication, there was the server_id variable that identified uniquely a node in a replication system. The variable is still here, but in MySQL 5.6 it was joined by another value, which is created during the server initialisation, regardless of its involvement in a replication system. The server_uuid is a string of hexadecimal characters that is the basis for global transaction identifiers:

select @@server_id, @@server_uuid;
+-------------+--------------------------------------+
| @@server_id | @@server_uuid                        |
+-------------+--------------------------------------+ …

MySQL-Sandbox 3.1.11 introduces a new utility, different from anything I have put before in the MySQL Sandbox toolkit.

make_sandbox_from_url downloads a tiny MySQL tarball from a repository and install it straight away.

As of today, the following packages are available

It's usually a good practice to have two columns called date_created and date_updated in every table. One can always use it in application and it helps in debugging too as to when a record was created and last updated in various circumstances and contexts.




This responsibility can be given to MySQL to automatically assign current time values to these columns.

In MySQL 5.6 onwards, this can be done by setting the data type of the columns to be either date time or timestamp and creating date_created column with NOT NULL DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP  schema and date_updated column with NOT NULL DEFAULT …

Overview

When I got interested in Docker, I started playing idly with the idea of integrating containers and MySQL Sandbox. My first experiments were not encouraging. Using a container the same way I would use a regular server produced horrible results. I started by creating a Debian or CentOS container, installing MySQL Sandbox, and then importing an expanded tarball into the container. What happens is that tarballs of recent MySQL versions expand to roughly 2 GB of binaries. When you try to put that into a container you get a bloated file system. If you want to expand more than one tarball, you get an enormous unusable blob that is contrary to what containers should be used for. There is, of course, the possibility of using volumes, which would avoid the problem of making the container …

During the PerconaLive conference in Amsterdam, I attended a session where I heard a good piece of advice about using GTID. It amounts to: look at SHOW SLAVE STATUS output, and if you see more than one line in the Executed_Gtid_Set field, this tells you immediately if someone has written on a slave database.
This is good advice. Let's dissect it. Here is what a regular slave looks like, when nobody has messed up with it:

SHOW SLAVE STATUS\G
*************************** 1. row ***************************
 [...]
             Master_Server_Id: 1
                  Master_UUID: 00013454-1111-1111-1111-111111111111
             Master_Info_File: mysql.slave_master_info
                    SQL_Delay: 0
          SQL_Remaining_Delay: NULL
      Slave_SQL_Running_State: Slave has read all relay log; waiting for more …

The Sakila sample database was created almost 10 years ago, as a sample set of data for MySQL courses and examples.

The database was developed by MySQL employees, with substantial contributions form the community.

Recently, the database was updated to use some of the features in MySQL 5.7. As a result, we had two sets of samples, one to use with MySQL 5.0+, and one that only loads with MySQL 5.7.

I filed a feature request, offering a patch to use conditional schema and data changes, which was incorporated very quickly into the official release.

The current release, available within the …