The other day on a call, a client asked me an interesting question.  We were discussing some testing they were doing in Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS).  The question came up “since RDS is managed, how can I prove to my security team that the data is actually encrypted?”  We’ve all read whitepapers and blogs that talk about encryption in the cloud, but it is something I’ve not needed to validate before.  Instead, I just enable encryption when I create an RDS instance and move along to the next steps of the setup. This discussion really got me thinking – what is the best way to enable and test encryption at rest in my RDS instance?

Encryption at Rest – MySQL Fundamentals

Before getting too far into the RDS specifics, I wanted to cover the basics of encryption at rest in MySQL.  There are essentially two ways to encrypt data at rest:

• Full disk encryption (filesystem/block …

Databases are complicated software made to handle the concurrent load while making specific guarantees about data consistency and availability. There are many scenarios which should be tested that can only happen under concurrent conditions.

Pstress is a probability-based open-source database testing tool designed to run in concurrency and to test if the database can recover when something goes wrong. It generates random transactions based on options provided by the user. With the right set of options, users can test features, regression, and crash recovery. It can create the concurrent load on a cluster or on a single server.

The tool is currently in beta, but it has already become very important within the testing pipeline for Percona. Pstress is widely used by Percona’s QA team during each phase of testing. It has …

MySQL has the capability of generating random passwords for user accounts, as an alternative to requiring explicit administrator-specified literal passwords.

The post MySQL Security - Random Password Generation first appeared on dasini.net - Diary of a MySQL expert.

Last time I shared a video that is an introduction to Using MySQL without the SQL.   This time I am adding two more videos -- one on Document Collections and another on simple indexes.  The MySQL Document Store is a simple, easy to use way to for developers to store data without much of the traditional pre-requisite chores needed with a relational database.

You simple connect to the MySQL instance using the new MySQL Shell to the schema of your choice, create a document collection, and can start saving data right …

Percona XtraDB Cluster 8.0 is on the final stretch before GA release, and we have pre-release packages available for testing.

I wanted to see how Percona XtraDB Cluster 8.0 performs in CPU and IO-bound scenarios, like in my previous posts about MySQL Group Replication.

In this blog, I want to evaluate Percona XtraDB Cluster 8.0 scaling capabilities in cases when we increase the number of nodes and increase user connections. The version I used is available here: Percona-XtraDB-Cluster-8.0.18. …

When I run a benchmark and want to measure the CPU efficiency of something, I find it’s often a good choice to run a benchmark program, as well as the database, on the same server. This is in order to eliminate network impact and to look at single-thread performance, to eliminate contention.

Usually, this approach gives rather stable results; for example, benchmarking MySQL with Sysbench OLTP Read-Only workload I get a variance of less than one percent between 1-minute runs.

In this case, though, I was seeing some 20 percent difference between the runs, which looked pretty random and would not go away even with longer 10-minute runs.

The benchmark I did was benchmarking MySQL through ProxySQL (all running on the same machine):

Sysbench -> ProxySQL -> MySQL 

As I thought more about possible reasons, I thought CPU scheduling might be a problem. As requests pass …

When connecting to a local MySQL instance, you have two commonly used methods: use TCP/IP protocol to connect to local address –  “localhost” or 127.0.0.1  – or use Unix Domain Socket.

If you have a choice (if your application supports both methods), use Unix Domain Socket as this is both more secure and more efficient.

How much more efficient, though?  I have not looked at this topic in years, so let’s see how a modern MySQL version does on relatively modern hardware and modern Linux.

Benchmarking  TCP/IP Connection vs Unix Domain Socket for MySQL

I’m testing Percona Server for MySQL 8.0.19 running on Ubuntu 18.04 on a Dual Socket 28 Core/56 Threads Server.  (Though I have validated results on 4 …

Early on in the MySQL 8.0 Release series there were a couple of key items related to our everyday use.  They are MySQL-Shell‘s establishing the “Pluggable Password Store” in 8.0.12, and its super enhance API Command Line Interface in 8.0.13… which the Pluggable Password Store also adopted. Sadly, most content highlighting the API CLI capability when it came… Read More »

It’s the in-between term time and we’re all stuck at home. I decided to update the image for my Fedora 30 virtual machine. I had a work around to the update issue that I had encountered last October in Bug #96969 but it was not required with the current version. However, after updating from MySQL 8.0.17 to MySQL 8.0.19, I found that my Java connection example failed.

The $CLASSPATH value was correct:

/usr/share/java/mysql-connector-java.jar:.

The first error that I got was the my reference to MySQL JDBC driver was incorrect. The error message is quite clear:

Loading class `com.mysql.jdbc.Driver'. This is deprecated. The new driver class is `com.mysql.cj.jdbc.Driver'. The driver is automatically registered via the SPI and manual loading of the driver class is generally unnecessary.
Cannot connect to database server:
The server time zone …

In this post, I want to evaluate Group Replication Scaling capabilities in cases when we increase the number of nodes and increase user connections. While this setup is identical to that in my post “Evaluating Group Replication Scaling Capabilities in MySQL”,  in this case, I will use an I/O bound workload.

For this test, I will deploy multi-node bare metal servers, where each node and client are dedicated to an individual server and connected between themselves by a 10Gb network.

Also, I will use 3-nodes and 5-nodes Group Replication setup. In both cases, the load is directed only to ONE node, but I expect with five nodes there is some additional overhead from replication.

Hardware specifications:

System | Supermicro; SYS-F619P2-RTN; v0123456789 (Other)
Service Tag | …