In this entry of the series we explore using VARCHAR and CHAR data types in your database and give some pointers on which type is best to use and when.

The subtitle of this post could have been “Review of an awesome MySQL event”.

I’ve been invited by the MySQL Italian team to deliver a session about MySQL Shell during the MySQL Day in Roma. This was the very first in person event by MySQL Italy since the pandemic.

The amount of attendees was large and we could feel the emotion and the enthusiasm of the audience. Everybody enjoyed to finally be together again and discus about MySQL.

The day started with a MySQL Overview by Andra Cazacu. She was very emotionalized to see how the room was packed.

I was really great to see all those people smiling, I could feel that people were very happy to be present at this event.

The Show Runner

After Andra, it was already the turn of the Italian Star: “il grande Marco Carlessi” !

Marco presented the latest news in MySQL:

• Multi Factor Authentication
• New …

I’ve had this list on a post-it note on my monitor for all of 2022. I figured it was time to write it down, and reuse the space.

In summary, AWS suffers from the same problem that almost every other product does. It sacrifices improved security for backward compatibility of functionality. IMO this is not in the best practices of a data ecosystem that is under constant attack.

• Storage should be encrypted by default. When you launch an RDS cluster its storage is not encrypted. This goes against their own AWS Well-Architected Framework Section 2 – Security.
• Plain text passwords. To launch a cluster you must specify a password in plain text on the command line, again not security best practice. At least change this to using a known secret from AWS secrets manager.
• TLS for administrative accounts should be the only option. The root user should only be REQUIRE SSL (MySQL syntax).
• Expanding on …

in this tutorial, we’ll learn How to enable MySQL Workbench dark theme on Windows and Linux. Only macOS and Linux support dark themes in MySQL Workbench. This tutorial will help you enable the dark theme on MySQL Workbench for Windows and Linux. How To Enable MySQL Workbench dark theme on Windows Only versions 8.0.26 or […]

The post Set Dark Theme on MySQL Workbench appeared first on Phpflow.com.

Where I work, we are using MySQL in a scale-out configuration to handle our database needs.

That means, you write to a primary server, but reads generally go to a replica database further down in a replication tree.

A number of additional requirements that should not concern you as a developer make it a little bit more elaborate than a simple “primary and a number of replicas” configuration. But the gist of all that is:

• there is always a read-copy of the database very close to your application, latency wise
• there are always sufficient copies of the data around so that we can afford to run our databases on unraided local storage.

The nature of our databases is such, that we drown all data reads with sufficient memory, where ever that is possible. Our databases are Memory Engines, when it comes to reads.

I joke about that:

You, too, can be a successful database …

Geo locations are a cornerstone of modern applications. Whether you’re a food delivery business or a family photographer, knowing the closest “something” to you or your clients can be a great feature.

In our ‘Scaling and Optimization’ training class for MySQL, one of the things we discuss is column types. The spatial types are only mentioned in passing, as less than 0.5% of MySQL users know of their existence (that’s a wild guess, with no factual basis). In this post, we briefly discuss the POINT type and how it can be used to calculate distances to the closest public park.

Import the data

To start off, we need a few tables and some data. The first table will hold the mapping between the zip code and its associated latitude/longitude. GeoNames has this data under the Creative Commons v3 license, …

Let’s continue the discovery of the MySQL Database Resource when deploying on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure using Terraform.

Last week, we saw how to create custom configurations and define user variables. Today we will see how we can define a backup policy and a maintenance window.

Backup Policy

In the oci_mysql_mysql_db_system resource, we will add a new section called backup_policy like this:

backup_policy {
       is_enabled        = "true"
       retention_in_days = "3"
       window_start_time = "01:00-00:00"
       freeform_tags = {"backup_defined_by"="Terraform"}
       pitr_policy {
            is_enabled = "true"
       }
}

This part of code (you can see in a working Terraform architecture sample), enables backup, sets the retention days to 3. It also defines the starting time …

Where I work, there is an ongoing discussion about test data generation. At the moment we do not replace or change any production data for use in the test environments, and we don’t generate test data.

That is safe and legal, because production data is tokenized. That is, PII and PCI data is being replaced by placeholder tokens which can be used by applications to access the actual protected data through specially protected access services. Only a very limited circle of people is dealing with data in behind the protected services.

Using production data in test databases is also fast, because we copy data in parallel, at line speed, or we make redirect-on-write (“copy-on-write” in the age of SSD) writeable snapshots available.

Assume for a moment we want to change that and

• mask data from production when we copy it to test databases
• reduce the amount of data used in test databases, while …

The microservice architecture is not a new pattern but has become very popular lately for mainly two reasons: cloud computing and containers. That combo helped increase adoption by tackling the two main concerns on every infrastructure: Cost reduction and infrastructure management.

However, all that beauty hides a dark truth:

The hardest part of microservices is the data layer

And that is especially true when it comes to classic relational databases like MySQL. Let’s figure out why that is.

MySQL and the microservice

Following the same two pillars of microservices (cloud computing and containers), what can one do with that in the MySQL space? What do cloud computing and containers bring to the table?

Cloud computing

The magic of the cloud is that it allows you to be cost savvy by letting you easily SCALE UP/SCALE DOWN the size of your instances. No more wasted money on …

Once again, OpenLampTech has another full issue for all of your MySQL, PHP, and LAMP stack content. The publication continues to grow. Thank you all for reading.

The Newsletter for PHP and MySQL Developers

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In OpenLampTech issue #45, enjoy articles covering:

• Symfony’s Twig
• MySQL PIVOT functionality
• Building a niche website with WordPress
• 10 popular Linux distros
• And much much more.

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