As part of my ongoing series around MySQL 8 user administration, I’d like to cover one of the new features introduced in MySQL 8.0.27 – multi-factor authentication. In order to establish identity, multi-factor authentication (MFA) is the use of multiple authentication values (factors) during the MySQL authentication process.

Introduction

MFA provides greater security compared to a single-factor authentication method, which has historically been based on simple methods such as password authentication. With MFA, additional authentication methods are enabled, such as requiring multiple passwords, or with devices such as smart cards, security keys, or biometric readers.

As of MySQL 8.0.27, it is now possible to require up to three authentication values to establish identity. In addition to the more common 2FA (two-factor authentication), MySQL can now also support 3FA (three-factor authentication) to complement the …

In keeping with my MySQL 8 user administration and security theme, I’d like to discuss the password verification-required policy introduced in MySQL 8.0.13. With this feature, it is possible to require that attempts to change an account password be verified by specifying the existing current password to be replaced.

Introduction

The password verification-required policy enables DBAs to prevent users from changing a password without proving that they know the current password. When would this happen? Such changes could occur if a user walked away from a terminal session without logging out, and a malicious user uses the open session to change the original user’s MySQL password. As you can imagine, this could have disastrous consequences:

• The original user is now unable to access MySQL until an administrator can reset the account password. 
• The malicious user can access MySQL until a password …

When MySQL client connects to the server it uses one of the authentication plugins. On the server-side, plugins are located in the directory, specified by the option plugin-dir that defaults to

BASEDIR/lib/plugin

  where

BASEDIR

  is the base directory of your MySQL installation. This perfectly works whenever you install MySQL using package manager, or from the Linux tarball.

However, authentication plugins should be also loaded on the client-side. If you installed MySQL into the custom location, you may end up with an error when trying to connect using any plugin requiring a separate client library.

For example, let’s set the …

Oracle released MySQL 8.0.28 on January 18th with little fanfare, as part of their four times a year release cycle.  So what is included in the new release? Over the past few years, there have been some cool new features included in these ‘dot’ releases that some in the community say would have been better off being labeled as a major release. But what is in .28? Below are the more interesting changes in the database server and the shell, as there was not a whole lot changed in the other products such as router or MEM… I put my asides in italics and my views probably do not reflect the views of anyone else.

And remember, 8.0.29 is due in April.

The TL;DR

The TL;DR synopsis is that a lot of excellent work went into MySQL Server & shell 8.0.28 but the pressing question is do you really need to install it right away?  On the scale from ‘you probably should wait to upgrade’ to ‘update ASAP’ …

KMIP (Key Management Interoperability Protocol) is an open standard developed by OASIS (Organization for Advancement of Structured Information Standards) for the encryption of stored data and cryptographic key management.

Percona Server for MySQL 8.0.27 and Percona XtraBackup 8.0.27 now include a KMIP keyring plugin to enable the exchange of cryptographic keys between a key management server and the database for encryption purposes. The procedure to use them with HashiCorp Vault Enterprise is described below.

Install Hashicorp Vault Enterprise

We will first install Hashicorp Vault Enterprise on Ubuntu Linux “Bionic” and then enable …

A little bit ago, I released a blog post comparing the backup performance of different MySQL tools such as mysqldump, the MySQL Shell feature called Instance Dump, mysqlpump, mydumper, and Percona XtraBackup. You can find the first analysis here:

Backup Performance Comparison: mysqldump vs. MySQL Shell Utilities vs. mydumper vs. mysqlpump vs. XtraBackup …

It is always hard to select a CPU for your own purpose. You could waste hours reviewing different benchmarks, reviews, and bloggers, and in the end, we would limit all our requirements to performance and price. For performance measuring we already have some specific metrics (e.g. in MHz to some specific tool), however, for economic comparison, it is quite hard.  Mostly we are limited by our budget. Again, for our personal purposes, we are limited only with the cash in our pockets. It is easy to compare only two or three CPUs; it is required just to compare their price and performance and then create a simple bar plot and then check the results. However, what do you do if you have at least three types of CPU, a different number of CPUs cores on board, and seven different scenarios?  It was a challenge to do it for performance, and for economic efficiency, it has become a nightmare. For a one-time purchase, it should be easier than for the …

Incremental backups of MySQL, specifically for the InnoDB engine, are taken by copying modified pages from the previous backup.

The brute force method takes backups by scanning every page in tablespace file in the server data directory is an expensive operation. The time required for incremental backups increases as the data-dir size increases.

To solve this problem, Percona Server for MySQL introduced a  “Changed Page Tracking” feature in 5.6 that enables Percona XtraBackup (PXB) to copy only the modified pages required for incremental backups. See the Percona XtraBackup Documentation for more information. …

It is essential to upgrade MySQL to the most recent version. Do you believe it’s tough to test and upgrade to a newer version?

For a variety of reasons, including new features, performance advantages, bug corrections, and so on, databases with obsolete versions are vulnerable. Major version upgrades, on the other hand, can be problematic if they haven’t been extensively tested with your application, as the procedure may break it, prevent it from functioning properly, or result in performance concerns.

Let’s go through a few useful tools that can assist you with MySQL upgrades.

• pt-upgrade

The tool helps you run application SELECT queries and generates reports on how each query pattern performs on the servers across the different versions of MySQL we tested.

• …

Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) offers a great deal of flexibility when it comes to the state transfer (SST) options (used when a new node is automatically provisioned with data). For many environments, on-the-fly compression capability gives great benefits of saving network bandwidth during the process of sending sometimes terabytes of data. The usual choice for compression here is a built-in Percona XtraBackup compress option (using qpress internally), or options compressor/decompressor for the compression tool of choice. In the second case, the popular option is the gzip or its …