As a Solutions Engineer at Percona, one of my responsibilities is to support our customers as they investigate new and emerging technologies. This affords me the opportunity to speak to many current and new customers who partner with Percona.

The topic of Kubernetes is becoming more popular as companies are investigating and adopting this technology. The issue most companies are encountering is having a stateful database that doesn’t fall victim to an environment tuned for ephemeral workloads. This obviously introduces a level of complexity as to how to run a stateful database in an inherently stateless world, as databases are not natively designed for that.

To make your life easier, as a part of the Percona Cloud-Native Autonomous Database Initiative, our engineering teams have built a …

In Percona’s Managed Services, we start up and shut down MySQL servers all the time.  Over the years, we’ve seen various issues occur due to the way servers are shut down.  No matter if it is a situation where unexpected errors appear in the log or you’re stuck waiting for hours for a server to finishing shut down… Here are some steps we can take to minimize any trouble and prepare MySQL for shutdown.

This list of “super safe practices” was born from lessons we’ve learned in a wide variety of MySQL environments.

1. Stop Replication.

Under some (rare) circumstances, a slave may try to startup in the incorrect position. To help minimize this risk, stop the IO thread first so it’s not receiving new events.

STOP SLAVE IO_THREAD;

Wait for the SQL thread to apply all events, then stop it too.

SHOW SLAVE STATUS\G
STOP SLAVE SQL_THREAD;

This puts both of the …

Given a JSON object:
SET @j := '{"BOOSTER": 1, "RETRO": 2, "GUIDANCE": 0, "SURGEON": 1, "RECOVERY": 0}';

How do you find the keys which do NOT contain a value of 0?

A second approach to finding the non-0 values from a JSON object is to turn the keys and values into separate columns of a table. This is cleaner, but a little wordier.

We’ll get the keys in one table:

SELECT ord, keyname 
FROM JSON_TABLE(JSON_KEYS(@j), '$[*]' COLUMNS (
    ord FOR ORDINALITY,
    keyname VARCHAR(100) PATH '$')
) AS keyTable;
 +------+----------+
 | ord  | keyname  |
 +------+----------+
 |    1 | RETRO    |
 |    2 | BOOSTER  |
 |    3 | SURGEON  |
 |    4 | GUIDANCE |
 |    5 | RECOVERY |
 +------+----------+

And the values in a second table:

SELECT ord, …

As Alkin and Ramesh have shown us in their Testing Percona XtraDB Cluster 8.0 with DBdeployer post, it is now possible to easily deploy an environment to test the features provided by the brand new release of Percona XtraDB Cluster 8.0.

We have also worked on creating a testing environment available for those that use Vagrant instead. Be it that it’s what you are used to working with, or that you want a proper VM for each instance, in particular, you can use the following commands to easily deploy a three-node cluster.

Requirements

Vagrant runs in Linux, Mac OS, and Windows, you just need to have the packages installed. Visit …

On Monday April 27th, MySQL released a much-anticipated patch release 8.0.20. Along with many bug fixes and improvements, a new property was introduced – binlog-transaction-compression. During our own internal testing we have discovered an incompatibility with our Continuent Tungsten products when this property is enabled.

The newly-released binlog-transaction-compression feature is really interesting because it compresses transaction payloads before being written into the binary logs, which in turn reduces the disk space overhead required for storage. I’m sure many users will be keen to implement this, however at this time the use of binlog-transaction-compression=ON will prevent Replication from functioning correctly.

This …

Given a JSON object:
SET @j := '{"BOOSTER": 1, "RETRO": 2, "GUIDANCE": 0, "SURGEON": 1, "RECOVERY": 0}';

How do you find the keys which do NOT contain a value of 0?

One approach is to find the keys which do match 0, and then remove them.

Sounds like JSON_SEARCH and JSON_REMOVE? But there’s a gotcha: JSON_SEARCH works only with strings. Ok, so we REPLACE(@j, ‘0’, ‘”0″‘) – but that doesn’t help, because JSON_REMOVE can’t accept an array of paths like JSON_SEARCH would return; it requires each path as a separate parameter.

Instead, JSON_MERGE_PATCH will suffice. It has the feature that values from the second parameter are preserved only if they are not NULL. So, the approach becomes turning the 0s into NULLs, and then merging that document into an empty one.

SELECT REPLACE(@j, 0, 'null') AS j; -- …

Use MySQL Enterprise Audut plugin to track data changes on specific tables. Scripts and documentation on github: https://github.com/wwwted/Database-change-tracking Tracked data (audit logs) can then be inserted into reporting db using parser scripts. Limitations:

• Changing tracking rules stopps all tracking for existing connections until the reconnect. This is a limitation in MySQL EE Audit filter handling.
• No filtering for different users, easy to implement if needed in change_tracking.sql SP (START/STOP).
• Only tracking INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE statements. Easy to modify if needed.

1 Enable tracking on target server …

In this day and age, large enterprise companies make use of Ansible, Puppet, or Chef to provision MySQL servers, be it replica sets or clusters. This eases the burden of deployment and workflow management.

However, for some smaller companies, the learning curve hampers the immediate adoption of automation software. This is where the MySQL Shell helps, by allowing you to deploy an N-node InnoDB Cluster or ReplicaSet in less than 60 lines of code.

The Requirements

• Percona Server for MySQL version 8.0.17 or later, preferable version 8.0.19, each node started as standalone servers
• Percona MySQL Shell 8.0 or equivalent upstream version
• MySQL root user and password or equivalent user with grant option
• Hostname configured on each node, can be done with …

MySQL 8.0 has introduced an optional behavior that authorize users to change their password only if they could provide the current password.

The post MySQL Security - Password Verification-Required Policy first appeared on dasini.net - Diary of a MySQL expert.

In the light of support for Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC), the DBdeployer anniversary, and the newly released Percona XtraDB Cluster 8.0, I’m happy to announce that Giuseppe Maxia has recently updated DBdeployer to support Percona XtraDB Cluster 8.0.

We at Percona, with my colleague Ramesh Sivaraman, have tested and deployed Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) 8.0.18  successfully using DBdeployer.

What is DBdeployer and How Do You …