In Part I, we introduced a High Availability (HA) framework for MySQL hosting and discussed various components and their functionality. Now in Part II, we will discuss the details of MySQL semisynchronous replication and the related configuration settings that help us ensure redundancy and consistency of the data in our HA setup. Make sure to check back in for Part III where we will review various failure scenarios that could arise and the way the framework responds and recovers from these conditions.

What is MySQL Semisynchronous Replication?

Simply put, in a …

Have you been experiencing slow MySQL startup times in GTID mode? We recently ran into this issue on one of our MySQL hosting deployments and set out to solve the problem. In this blog, we break down the issue that could be slowing down your MySQL restart times, how to debug for your deployment, and what you can do to decrease your start time and improve your understanding of GTID-based replication.

How We Found The Problem

We were investigating slow MySQL startup times on a low-end, disk-based MySQL 5.7.21 deployment which had GTID mode enabled. The system was part of a master-slave pair and was under a moderate write load. When restarting during a scheduled maintenance, we …

In this three-part blog series, we will explain the details and functionality of a High Availability (HA) framework for MySQL hosting using MySQL semisynchronous replication and the Corosync plus Pacemaker stack. In Part I, we’ll walk you through the basics of High Availability, the components of an HA framework, and then introduce you to the HA framework for MySQL.

What is High Availability?

The availability of a computer system is the percentage of time its services are up during a period of time. It’s generally expressed as a series of 9′s. For example, the table below shows availability and the corresponding downtime measured over one year.

JSON has proven to be a very import data format with immense popularity. A good part of my time for the last two or so years has been dedicated to this area and I even wrote a book on the subject.  This is a comparison of the implementations of handling JSON data in MySQL and MariaDB. I had requests from the community and customers for this evaluation.


JSON Data Types Are Not All Equal
MySQL added a JSON data type in version 5.7 and it has proven to be very popular.  MariaDB has  JSON support  version 10.0.16 but is actually an alias to a longtext data type so that statement based replication from MySQL to MariaDB is possible.

MySQL stores  JSON documents are …

In this blog post, we review some of the important aspects of configuring and managing SSL in MySQL hosting. These would include the default configuration, disabling SSL, and enabling and enforcing SSL on a MySQL server. Our observations are based on the community version of MySQL 5.7.21.

Default SSL Configuration in MySQL

By default, MySQL server always installs and enables SSL configuration. However, it is not enforced that clients connect using SSL. Clients can choose to connect with or without SSL as the server allows both types of connections. Let’s see how to verify this default behavior of MySQL server.

When SSL is installed and enabled on MySQL server by default, we will typically see the following:

1. Presence of *.pem files in the MySQL data directory. These are the various client and server certificates and keys that are in …

Windowing functions are a critical tool for grouping rows of data that are related to other rows. But they go far beyond the regular aggregate functions found in MySQL 5.7 and earlier. In MySQL 8 you do not have to collapse all the information down into a single output row. Each row can retain its individual identity but the server can analyze the data as a unit.
Statistics and Damned Lies Finding the total Population of the District Texas from the world.city table is simple. 

SQL> select District, sum(Population)  
from city where district = 'Texas';
+----------+-----------------+
| District | sum(Population) |
+----------+-----------------+
| Texas    |         9208281 |
+----------+-----------------+
1 row in set (0.0068 sec)




…

Both MongoDB and the MySQL Document Store are JSON document stores.  The syntax differences in the two products are very interesting.  This long will be a comparison of how commands differ between these two products and may evolve into a 'cheat sheet' if there is demand.

I found an excellent Mongo tutorial Getting Started With MongoDB that I use as a framework to explore these two JSON document stores.
The DataI am using the primer-dataset.json file that MongoDB has been using for years  in their documentation, classes, and examples. MySQL has created the world_x data set based on the world database used for years in documentation, classes and examples.  The data set is a collection of JSON documents filled with restaurants around Manhattan.
…

Pretend you have a JSON array of data that looks roughly like the following.

mysql> insert into x(y) values('["a","b","c","d"]');
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.10 sec)

You could get all the values from that array using $[*]

mysql> select y->"$[*]" from x;
+----------------------+
| y->"$[*]"            |
+----------------------+
| ["a", "b", "c", "d"] |
+----------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

Or the individual members of the array with an index that starts with zero.

mysql> select y->"$[0]" from x;
+-----------+
| y->"$[0]" |
+-----------+
| "a"       |
+-----------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

But what about the times you want the last item in the array and really do not want to loop through all the items? How about using …

Semi-sync Replication is a plugin available for mysql which allows you to create more durable replication topologies.  For instance you can ensure that in the event of a master crash that at least one of your replicas has all transaction currently written to the master so that when you promote, you know you're not missing any data.

That's a huge simplification.

What's the downside?  Write speed.  If a transaction on your master have to wait until a replica acknowledges it has that transaction, then there is going to be some delay.  Not only that, but your network latency between the two points matters a lot.  If you want greater durability, the cost is performance.

It's important to note that the master doesn't wait until the replica actually runs the transaction on the …

JSON data is a wonderful way to store data without needing a schema but what about when you have to yank that data out of the database and apply some sort of formatting to that data?  Well, then you need JSON_TABLE.

JSON_TABLE takes free form JSON data and applies some formatting to it.  For this example we will use the world_x sample database's countryinfo table.  What is desired is the name of the country and the year of independence but only for the years after 1992.  Sound like a SQL query against JSON data, right? Well that is exactly what we are doing.

We tell the MySQL server that we are going to take the $.Name and $.IndepYear key's values from the JSON formatted doc column in  the table, format them into a string and a integer respectively, and alias the key value's name to a table column name that we can use for qualifiers in an SQL statement.

 …