Syslog is widely used for logging. It allows distributed logging. Having MySQL/MariaDB audit data logged to a remote Syslog server is a strong guaranty regarding security of the audit data. PCI compliance requires separation of duties. The separation of duties between DBA profiles and a security officer is a way to guaranty that Audit data [...]

As I wrote in a previous post, MariaDB / MySQL has some issues with the standard UTF-8 encoding there. This UTF-8 encoding limits us to 3 UTF-8 bytes or 2 UNICODE bytes if you want to look at it that way. This is slightly limiting, but for languages it is usually pretty much OK, although there are some little used languages in the 3 byte UNICODE range. But in addition to languages, you will be missing symbols, such as smileys!

Help is on the way though, in the utf8mb4 character set that is part of both MariaDB and MySQL. This is a character set that is just like the one just called utf8, except this one accepts all the UNICODE characters with up to 3 UNICODE bytes, or 4 bytes using the UTF-8 encoding.

This means that there are more limits to how long a column might be when using utf8mb4 compared …

Hello Demantra Customers!  There is a new tool being developed in Oracle Proactive Services.  The Demantra Performance and Setup Analyzer.  We are reviewing the data points now and release is scheduled for November 2013.   Check out the areas of coverage below.  Any comments?  Please post.  Regards!  Jeff

There are some parameters listed twice to deliver in context results.

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VERIFICATION
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Verify database name

Verify Database User

DBUser

Present the tnsnames.ora file to verify settings

Verify the ds.ini file

Check the Demantra version

Check the RIGHT PRIVILEGES are GRANTED

Echo on engine server, $ENGINE_ROOT, $ORACLE_HOME, …

Introduction Let us start by listing the scenarios in which we will need to perform shard maintenance. In addition to periodic maintenance operations the following situations might mandate performing shard maintenance.
A shard is physically a server group. A single non-performant server can impact the latency of requests for the entire group. Hence we need to be able to pull out this non-performant server and replace it by a spare, without impacting the accessibility of the entire shard.
Maintenance activity might involve performing software upgrades on the different servers in the server group of the shard.
We might also need to upgrade the hardware on all the machines in the server group of a shard without impacting the accessibility of the entire data.

What if we want to form an alternate group and migrate the entire shard there? For example during times of heavy load we will want to create a …

UNICODE is getting more and more traction and most new applications, at least web applications, support UNICODE. I have written about UNICODE and related stuff before in Character sets, Collations, UTF-8 and all that but before I go into some more specific and some issues, and fixes, let me tell you about UNICODE, UTF-8 and how MySQL interprets it. See the blogpost linked to above for more information on the subject, surprisingly even more boring, on Collations.

So, let's begin with UNICODE. UNICODE is a character set that is very complete, you should be able to make yourself understood in any language using the characters from this vast character set. This is not to say that all characters from all languages are in UNICODE, some are missing here and there and sometimes new characters make their way into …

Oracle released a bunch of MySQL stuff they’ve been working on since the last huge release, and my blog reader filled up with a few dozen posts I’m gonna have to read through so I don’t feel ignorant. Dear MySQL Engineering Team, could you take pity on me and release these gradually over the course of a month or so next time? Especially since Google discontinued Reader, and I’m using Feedly now, and it has a bug that I can’t figure out how to report, which result in articles being marked as read when I scroll, which makes me feel super-paranoid-insecure that I’m gonna miss an article that I scrolled over without having read yet.

Protocol tracing infrastructure

Since introduction of PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA in MySQL Server, it is possible to trace what happens inside the server when it executes client queries. The client-side protocol tracing framework is a similar mechanism in the MySQL Client Library. It allows tracing communication of the client with the server. The infrastructure has been included in MySQL 5.7.2 Development Milestone Release.

Unlike PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA, focus of the client-side tracing framework is on tracing the protocol flow and client-server I/O rather than the performance of the client library implementation. The client-side tracing framework recognizes trace events which happen during normal conversation between the client and the server. Events such as sending packets to the server, receiving server replies, establishing and terminating a connection are …

Syslog is widely used for logging. It allows separation of the storage of generated messages from the system that generated them. A lot of solution exists to aggregate, monitor, query, analyze syslog data. Syslog separation of data from the source is a key element for security auditing as it make it more difficult to repudiate [...]

When I get to talk to people about TokuMX and how it’s an optimized MongoDB, I sometimes get follow-up questions like:

• “Is it an in-memory proxy?”
• “Write optimized? So you buffer all of the writes in memory and lose them on crash?”
• “Did you re-implement the server and match the protocol?”

None of these things describe TokuMX, but it demonstrates that there are many schools of thought on how to optimize databases, and MongoDB in particular. I’d like to elaborate more on what TokuMX really is and how we built it. First, let’s talk about what MongoDB is.

MongoDB consists of a server process that stores data and executes queries, mongod, a sharding router process, mongos, as well as a wire protocol for interacting with these servers, and clients and language drivers that implement this …

The second edition of MySQL Connect took place just a few days ago, Sept 21-23, and was a great event. Thank you very much to all participants including speakers, sponsors, exhibitors and attendees! We hope you had a fantastic time and learned a lot.

The keynotes are now available for you to watch on demand (both highlights and full length), including:

The State of the Dolphin
Edward Screven, Chief Corporate Architect, Oracle
Tomas Ulin, Vice President of MySQL Engineering, Oracle

MySQL at Facebook
Harrison Fisk, Manager, Data Performance, Facebook

…