I recently had to do some customer work involving the McAfee MySQL Audit Plugin and would like to share my experience in this post.

Auditing user activity in MySQL  has traditionally been challenging. Most data can be obtained from the slow or general log, but this involves a lot of data you don’t need too, and isn’t flexible at all. The specific problem of logging failed connection attempts has been discussed on a previous post in our blog.

Starting with 5.1, the new plugin API gives us more flexibility by allowing users to extend the server’s functionality with their own code, and this is what the McAffee plugin does.

Installation and …

DrupalCamp Conference is hold in Göteborg, Sweden on May 25, 2013.

MySQL is part of this show and I would like to invite you to our session on "Scalability and Availability with MySQL Replication" given by Sven Sandberg on Saturday-May 25, 2013 @ 13:45-14:25!

So, if you are close to Göteborg or attending this event, do not forget to come to listen Sven's talk!

Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona XtraBackup 2.1.3 for MySQL on May 22, 2013. Downloads are available from our download site here and Percona Software Repositories.

This release fixes a high priority bug. It’s advised to upgrade your latest 2.1 version to 2.1.3 if you’re using the Percona XtraBackup with Percona XtraDB Cluster. This release is the latest stable …

There’s a big difference in how plugins are treated in MySQL and how they are treated in Drizzle. The MySQL way has been to create a C API in front of the C++-like (I call it C- as it manages to take the worst of both worlds) internal “API”. The Drizzle way is to have plugins be first class citizens and use exactly the same API as if they were inside the server.

This means that MySQL attempts to maintain API stability. This isn’t something worth trying for. Any plugin that isn’t trivial quickly surpasses what is exposed via the C API and has to work around it, or, it’s a storage engine and instead you have this horrible mash of C and C++. The byproduct of this is that no core server features are being re-implemented as plugins. This means the API is being developed in a vacuum devoid of usefulness. At least, this was the case… The authentication plugin API seems to be an exception, and it’s …

log_warnings = 2

Yields useful information in the MariaDB or MySQL error log file (or syslog on Debian/Ubuntu) you don’t want to miss out on.

You will know about aborted connections, which are otherwise only visible through global status as Aborted_connects (lost connection before they completed authentication) and Aborted_clients (cut fully authenticated connection).

It looks like

130523 2:14:05 [Warning] Aborted connection 173629 to db: 'unconnected' user: 'someapp' host: '10.2.0.50' (Unknown error)

You will know when, where from, and if for instance a wrong password was used you’ll see the username. Basically you’ll get as much info as the server has available at that point. Useful.

Lately there have been a lot of organisations trying to hire a devops engineer.
I myselve have been asked to fill in devops roles ..

There's a number of issues with that.

The biggest problem is that I always have to ask what exactly the organisation is looking for.

So you want a devops engineer with experience in Linux, MongoDB, MySQL and Java , does that mean you want a Java developer who is familiar with MySQL and Linux and breaths a devops Culture.
Or a Linux expert who understands Java developers and knows how to tune Mongo and MySQL ?

It's absolutely unclear what you want when you are hiring "A devops engineer"

The second problem is that you are trying to hire people who are knowledgeable about devops,

Yet a lot of those people know that you can't do devops on your own , devops is not a jobtitle. devops is not a new devops team you create.

To some of them you are …

Peter Zaitsev leads a track at the inaugural Percona MySQL University event in Raleigh, N.C. on Jan. 29, 2013.

Portland is a well-recognized hub for Open Source technologies in the Northwest, home to conferences such as OSCON and Open Source Bridge as well as hosts of OpenSQL Camp in 2009. As such it is a very natural place for our next Percona MySQL University event scheduled for June 17.

We run this event in partnership with MySQL Meetup at Portland organized by our own …

This blog post is part two in what is now a continuing series on the Star Schema Benchmark.

In my previous blog post I compared MySQL 5.5.30 to MySQL 5.6.10, both with default settings using only the InnoDB storage engine.  In my testing I discovered that innodb_old_blocks_time had an effect on performance of the benchmark.  There was some discussion in the comments and I promised to follow up with more SSB tests at a later date.

I also promised more low concurrency SSB tests when Peter blogged about the importance of performance at low concurrency.

The SSB
The SSB tests a database’s ability to optimize queries for a star schema. A star …

The MySQL Workbench team has been a little quiet for the past few months, but that’s because we’ve been busy working on an exciting new version. Read more about it in Tomas’ blog

The MySQL Developer Tools team is known for their steady release cycle, putting out a new MySQL Workbench release every 4-5 weeks. Now that it has been a bit quiet for a while you may wonder what is going on. Let me share some inside knowledge of what’s happening behind the scenes.

MySQL Workbench is a key component of our MySQL stack and extremely popular as shown by download numbers and interest in our white papers. It is the face of MySQL on the desktop, and we aim to make it even more popular for developers & DBAs than it is today. We have been looking for strong C++ and Python developers to grow the team further, and I’m happy to welcome Marcin Szalowicz from Poland and Miguel Tadeu from Portugal who started this Monday. They are going to work on both, the C++ backend and the native UI frontend of …