MySQL 8.0 brings a lot of new spatial features. The main feature is the support for multiple spatial reference systems (SRSs).

Spatial reference systems is not a new concept in MySQL, but 8.0 is the first version where it affects computations, and it’s the first version where users actually have to think about it.…

We have been told many times that modifying live database should be done with extreme care, we should always make a backup before doing something big to the database. However, there are countless stories on the Internet about losing data due to various reason, one of them is forgetting to create a backup (Gitlab is an example: https://about.gitlab.com/2017/02/01/gitlab-dot-com-database-incident/). I was facing the same issue when upgrading MySQL server to a new version. Luckily I was able to restore most of the data but it was still a very good lesson for me. One of lesson I learned is how we could restore the data from the *.ibd and *.frm file.

The database I worked with had many tables. There were about 5 of them using MyISAM engine while others were using InnoDB engine. I was asked to upgrade …

What does Anton Ego – a fictional restaurant critic from the Pixar movie Ratatouille – have to do with MySQL 8.0 GA?

When it comes to being a software critic, a lot.

In many ways, the work of a software critic is easy. We risk very little and thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to read and write.

But what about those who give their many hours of code development, and those who have tested such code before release? How about the many people behind the scenes who brought together packaging, documentation, multiple hours of design, marketing, online resources and more?

And all of that, I might add, is open source! Free for the world to take, copy, adapt and even incorporate in full or in part into their own open development.

It is in exactly that area that the …

All our customers are on Linux, They have multiple flavors of Linux actually – Ubuntu, CentOS, RedHat Linux, Oracle Linux, SUSE Linux etc. Though we are an full-service everything MySQL shop, Our consulting, support and managed services are never restricted to only MySQL Ops. , We are experts in Linux,  DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE). We have proven methods to deliver Linux performance audit / health check / diagnostics and recommendations. What are the tools we use for monitoring Linux ops. ? This post is about those tools we use regularly in MinervaDB for monitoring Linux operations:

How long Linux server is up and running ? 

[root@localhost ~]# uptime 
 12:32:56 up 1800 min,  83 users,  load average: 88.01, 88.52, 88.64
[root@localhost ~]#

Print all the processes running as root

[root@localhost ~]# ps -U root -u root 
  PID TTY          TIME CMD
    1 ? …

The requirements for managing and running a database in a modern enterprise have evolved over the past ten years. Those in charge of running enterprise databases have seen their focus shift from ensuring access and availability, to architecture, design and scalability responsibilities. Web-first companies pioneered the change by charging site reliability engineers (SRE’s) or multi-faceted DBAs with the task of ensuring that the company’s main revenue engine not only stayed up, but could scale to wherever the business needed to go. This is a far cry from the classic enterprise DBA’s top responsibilities: keep it up, keep it backed up, and react to issues as they present themselves.

Today, enterprises look for new revenue models to keep up with a shifting technology paradigm driven by the cloud. The requirements and needs for managing their database environments are changing along with this shift. In the SaaS world, application outages …

A number of new JSON functions have been added to MySQL 8.0. Since we appreciate that not everyone will be ready to upgrade to MySQL 8.0 the minute it is released, we have backported many of the new functions to MySQL 5.7 so that they are available starting with version 5.7.22.…

One of the highlights of Percona Live is that the winners of the annual MySQL Community Awards are announced. A 100% community effort, the awards were created to recognize community contribution. This year saw six very deserving winners in three categories:

MySQL Community Awards: Community Contributor of the year 2018

Two individuals received these awards:

• Jean-François Gagné
  Jean-François was nominated for his many blog posts, bug reports, and experiment results that make MySQL much better. His blog: https://jfg-mysql.blogspot.com/
• Sveta Smirnova
  Sveta spreads knowledge and good practice on all things MySQL as a frequent speaker and blogger. Her years of experience in testing, support, and consulting are shared in webinars, technical posts, conferences around the world …

The world is moving to UTF8, MySQL 8.0 has utf8mb4 charset as default now, but, to be honest, I was pretty surprised how sensible the "charset" related topic could be.. -- in fact you may easily hit huge performance overhead just by using an "odd" config settings around your client/server charset and collation. While to avoid any potential charset mismatch between client and server, MySQL has from a long time an excellent option : "skip-character-set-client-handshake" which is forcing any client connection to be "aligned" with server settings ! (for more details see the ref. manual : https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/server-options.html#option_mysqld_character-set-client-handshake) -- this option is NOT set by default (to leave you a freedom in choose of charsets used on client and server sides). However, in my …

We’re moving along at Percona Live 2018, and there are still packed and energetic talks after lunch.

My next session was with Andrew Regner, Production Engineer at Facebook. His talk was on securing access to Facebook’s databases.

Since the beginning, Facebook has used a conventional username/password to secure access to production MySQL instances. Over the last few years, they’ve been working on moving to x509 TLS client certificate authenticated connections. Given the many types of languages and systems at Facebook that use MySQL in some way, this required a massive amount of changes for a lot of teams.

This talk is both a technical overview of how their new solution works and hard-learned tricks for getting an entire company to change their underlying MySQL client libraries.

After his talk, …

Percona Live 2018 is moving along, and the first person I got a chance to talk with is Michael Demmer, Senior Staff Engineer at Slack. His talk was on Migrating to Vitess at (Slack Scale).

MySQL is the backbone of Slack’s data storage infrastructure. It handles billions of queries per day across thousands of sharded database hosts. Slack is migrating this system to use Vitess’ flexible sharding and topology management instead of simple application-based shard routing and manual administration. This effort aims to provide an architecture that scales to meet the growing demands of our largest customers and features while under pressure to maintain a stable and performant service.

This talk presented the core motivations behind our decision, why Vitess won out as the best option, and how Slack laid the groundwork for the …