In this April MySQL Lab release, we’ll provide you a more robust and release-ready InnoDB Memcached Engine with a few enhancements. The most notable addition is the SASL support, which gives users the capability to protect their MySQL database from unauthenticated access through memcached clients. In this blog, I will walk you through steps of getting this option enabled.

Background Info:
SASL stands for “Simple Authentication and Security Layer”, which is a Standard for adding authentication support to connection-based protocols. Memcached added SASL support starting its 1.4.3 release. And here is a good article that gives you some background on why and how SASL is supported in Memcached.

For InnoDB Memcached, the “Memcached mapped” user table must be registered in the “container” “system table”. And …

Note: this article was originally published on http://blogs.innodb.com on April 10, 2012 by Sunny Bains.

The Problem

In the past, users were unable to take full advantage of the FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK statement. InnoDB simply ignored the flush to disk part. If the table did not have any dirty pages in the InnoDB buffer that weren’t synced to disk (due to sheer luck) then it was safe to copy the .ibd file to another location. Also, the restore was not without its limitations and complications. The .ibd file could not be copied over to another server because InnoDB during import did not fix up metadata required for a trouble-free import. The main problems during …

In the spirit of supporting the community, Baron asked for a table-of-contents blog post that encapsulated all of the recent Oracle 5.6 DMR posts.

I agree with Baron, a huge amount of information came out today, and this Development Milestone Release (DMR) does have some great features. So below is a list of all of the related blog posts around the 5.6.5-m8 DMR. Hopefully this makes it easier for everyone to find their related information.

Replication goodies in 5.6 posted in the DevZone

Multi-Threaded Slave benchmarks posted by Mat Keep

…

This is just an update to let you know that the new SkySQL Training Schedule is now available online.

The schedule extends as far as September 2012.

There are courses in the Belgium, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Ireland, the Netherlands, Sweden, and and the United States.

And some of the course titles include:

• Administering a MySQL® Database
• Developing Applications with the MySQL® Database
• Performance Tuning for the MySQL® Database
• High Availability for the MySQL® Database
• Administering MySQL® Cluster

You can read the full schedule here:

http://www.skysql.com/services/training/schedule?vdt=training_course_list|page_3

The problem
After making several performance fixes, notable among them being the kernel mutex split and the new handling of read-only transaction and in particular non-locking auto-commit read-only transactions, we weren’t seeing any increase in transaction per second (TPS) on our high-end hardware. On this one particular host, a 24 core with 2 threads per core host. The TPS using Sysbench was a tepid 5.6K at 16 threads and more or less plateaued till 1K user threads. No matter what config setting we used, we would more or less end up with the same result.

We ended up getting together for a meeting at Paris to discuss this issue and during the brain storming, one of the potential issues that cropped up was the effect of cache coherence and/or false sharing. After using …

Oracle has released another huge batch of improvements to MySQL slated for MySQL 5.6. The pace of innovation in MySQL is accelerating rapidly and the improvements are impressive. I have not read all of the blog posts thoroughly yet, but I’ve skimmed and it looks fantastic.

The link posted above is ONE of the sets of improvements: there are also a bunch of other posts about new improvements to the query optimizer, InnoDB, and probably more. But I don’t see a single table-of-contents blog post for those that I can link to. Hence I recommend that you look at Planet MySQL to find these posts.

Further Reading:

• Great things afoot in MySQL …

This feature is a continuation of the “Fast Index Creation” feature introduced in Fast Index Creation in the InnoDB Storage Engine. Now you can perform other kinds of DDL operations on InnoDB tables online: that is, with minimal delay for operations on that table, and without rebuilding the entire table. This enhancement improves responsiveness and availability in busy production environments, where making a table unavailable for seconds or minutes whenever its column definitions change is not practical.

The DDL operations enhanced by this feature are these variations on the …

This is just a post to let you 5.0 users know that 5.0.96 is now available.

You may have read about some of the security bugs fixed in the recent 5.0.95, and now 5.0.96 is available (it’s been nearly 9 months since 5.0.94 was released – so this is quite a lot of activity as far as 5.0 is concerned).

So if for some reason you’re still running MySQL 5.0, you should at least upgrade to the latest 5.0.96.

The upgrade process should be smooth and simple if you’re already running 5.0 (just be safe and backup your data first though).

You can download 5.0.96 from here:

http://downloads.skysql.com/archive/index/p/mysql/v/5.0.96

And if you’re interested in the 5.0 changelogs, I have direct links to them here (just look for MySQL 5.0):

…

If you’re attending the conference, be sure to stay the extra day (this Friday) for the SkySQL and MariaDB Consulting Lounge and Solutions Day.

You can register for the Free Solutions Day here (just name, email, company, and country):

http://www.skysql.com/mysql-solutions-day

And if you’re around that day, there will be a SkySQL and MariaDB Consulting Lounge open all day long, so feel free to stop by and speak directly with the SkySQL and MariaDB Experts.

More about the Consulting Lounge can be found here too.

I just wanted to give a quick shout out and say thank you to all who have been sharing talks and exciting news from the conference for those of us who weren’t able to attend!

It’s greatly appreciated!

And please keep up the great work.