I’ve been lately compiling and generating .deb packages for several MySQL and MariaDB recent versions, and I wanted to try them more in depth -specially MySQL 8.0 and MariaDB 10.2, both of which are still in development.

Several people have already given their first impressions (or will do soon), and testing early is the best way to catch bugs and regressions, and get them fixed before the official release. In fact, as I will comment later, I ran into breaking bugs on both MySQL 8.0 and MariaDB 10.2, which I …

About one month ago, the MySQL team at Oracle released MySQL 8.0, with a large list of changes. One of the most interesting features in the new release is also one that does not show up much, also because the team has gone to great length to keep most of its implementation hidden: the data dictionary.

What makes the data dictionary so interesting, despite its scarce visibility, is the effect that it has on performance. Up to MySQL 5.7, searching the information_schema was an onerous operation, potentially crippling the system. In MySQL 8.0, the same operations are …

With Oracle Open World behind us, we are now getting ready for the next big event, i.e. the European edition of PerconaLive. I am going to be a presenter three times:

• MySQL operations in Docker is a three-hour tutorial, and it will be an expansion of the talk by the same title presented at OOW. Attendees who want to play along can do it, by coming prepared with Docker 1.11 or later and the following images already pulled (images with [+] are mandatory, while [-] are optional):

  …

The freshly released MySQL 8.0 includes a data dictionary, which makes MySQL much more reliable. Thanks to this features, we don't have any '.frm' files, and querying the information_schema is 30x to 100x faster than previous versions.

One drawback of the implementation is that the data dictionary tables are hidden by design.

While the reason is fully understandable (they don't want to commit on an interface that may change in the future) many curious users are disappointed, because openness is the basis of good understanding and feedback.

The problem to access the dictionary tables can be split in three parts:

• Finding the list of tables; …

MySQL is a growing presence at Oracle Open World. While most of the headlines belong to the main products, where Oracle services are aiming at world domination, MySQL shared the spotlight, as it was announced to be part of Oracle database cloud. It seems a logical move for Oracle: after all the effort to make MySQL 5.7 the biggest release ever, it stands to reason that it is offered as a competitive feature in its own database as a service.

With this offer, Oracle is applying enterprise pricing and methodologies to a target of emerging companies. MySQL in the Oracle cloud differs from the competition by a few key points:

• It's only MySQL 5.7. While this is the most advanced MySQL server …

Now that MySQL 8.0 has been revealed, it's time to take a deep look at replication features in the latest releases, and review its overall design.

Server UUID vs Server-ID

At the beginning of replication, there was the server_id variable that identified uniquely a node in a replication system. The variable is still here, but in MySQL 5.6 it was joined by another value, which is created during the server initialisation, regardless of its involvement in a replication system. The server_uuid is a string of hexadecimal characters that is the basis for global transaction identifiers:

select @@server_id, @@server_uuid;
+-------------+--------------------------------------+
| @@server_id | @@server_uuid                        |
+-------------+--------------------------------------+ …

MySQL 8.0.0 was released today. It has been some time in the making, shrouded in a veil of secrecy for over one year. We knew, from listening to the gossip and looking at the few available previews, some of what was going to bring. So, for the observant users, its main features may not come as a surprise. For the rest of you, here's a quick roundup:

Notable features

• No MyISAM tables anymore! The grant tables are now InnoDB, meaning that grant operations are now atomic.
• A real data dictionary. This change is less visible than the previous one. The data dictionary tables are hidden and only a subset of the data is available through information_schema views. The reason for the hidden tables is to allow a stable interface through several versions. I am …