The Case

Securing MySQL is always a challenge. There are general best practices that can be followed for securing your installation, but the more complex setup you have the more likely you are to face some issues which can be difficult to troubleshoot.

We’ve recently been working on a case (thanks Alok Pathak and Janos Ruszo for their major contribution to this case) where MySQL started becoming unavailable when threads activity was high, going beyond a threshold, but not always the same one.

During that time there were many logs like the following, and mysqld was becoming unresponsive for a few seconds.

2019-11-27T10:26:03.476282Z 7736563 [Note] Got an error writing communication packets
2019-11-27T10:26:03.476305Z 7736564 [Note] Got an error writing …

At re:Invent in Las Vegas in December 2019, AWS announced the public preview of RDS Proxy, a fully managed database proxy that sits between your application and RDS. The new service offers to “share established database connections, improving database efficiency and application scalability”.

But one of the benefits that caught my eye is the ability to reduce the downtime in case of an instance failure and a failover. As for the announcement:

In case of a failure, RDS Proxy automatically connects to a standby database instance while preserving connections from your application and reduces failover times for RDS and Aurora multi-AZ databases by up to 66%”

You can read more about the announcement and the new service on the AWS …

A database proxy is a wonderful tool that is able to provide significant functionality across various use cases. For example, a seamless master role switch to another node for maintenance; transparency with read and write connections; or providing automatic, intelligent database load balancing.

In the MySQL world, these proxies provide a single entry point into MySQL databases for the calling client applications. Or put differently, the proxy is a middle layer sitting between a MySQL database and an application. The application connects to a proxy, which then forwards connections into the database.

Good proxies make MySQL database clusters appear like single databases by hiding the “behind-the-scenes-plumbing” from the application. One …

What a great way to start the New Year!  I woke up this morning to find in the news that MySQL won the DBMS of the year award for 2019.

“MySQL is the database management system that gained more popularity in our DB-Engines Ranking within the last year than any of the other 350 monitored systems.
We thus declare MySQL as the DBMS of the Year 2019”, says DB-Engine.

Getting the highest popularity gain among over 350 monitored systems is really impressive but this could only happen because of you, the users of MySQL.  Thank you all for your ongoing support and your feedback to help us continue to make MySQL always better.

As for the method used for determining the winner every year, DB-Engine explained it …

Starting with Percona Server for MySQL 8.0.17, Percona Server ships with a data masking plugin, using the same API as the MySQL Enterprise Masking and De-identification feature. This plugin was developed by Francisco Miguel Biete and was submitted to Percona Server as a community contribution. He also wrote an excellent post describing his contribution for Percona’s Community Blog titled Percona Server for MySQL 8.0 – New Data Masking Feature and the full list of functions can be found in the documentation of the MySQL Enterprise plugin. …

If you prefer to work with MySQL via its command-line interface, you'll like mycli which is a CLI tool with auto-completion and syntax highlighting built on top of Python and prompt_toolkit for building interactive command line applications with Python.

It is cross-platform and it is tested on Linux, MacOS and Windows.

According to the official website:

mycli is a command line interface for MySQL, MariaDB, and Percona with auto-completion and syntax highlighting.

Prerequisites

Python 2.7 or Python 3.4+.

How to Install MyCLI?

Supposed you have Python and pip installed, open a new terminal and run the following command: $ pip install mycli

Check out the official website for instructions on how to install MyCLI on the other platforms.

You can check the source code of this tool on GitHub.

Understanding MySQL 8.0 Group Replication Limitations to build an highly reliable MySQL Infrastructure Operations  Introduction – Redundant and fault-tolerant database systems

Most of our customers are 24*7 internet properties and their applications ( i.e. entire business operations) rely heavily on availability of respective database systems nodes, These systems going unavailable cause serious impact on reputation, customer experience and revenue. To ensure business continuity under foreseeable and unforeseeable man-made or natural disasters, the database system has to be designed and built with fault tolerance and disaster recovery capabilities, in other words the component can be removed and the system should continue to operate as expected. High availability refers to the characteristics of a system that allow the system to sustain continuous operation in the event of hardware and software failures due to natural or man …

The database backend affects the application, which can then impact organizational performance. When this happens, those in charge tend to want a quick fix. There are many different roads to improve performance in MySQL. As a very popular choice for many organizations, it's pretty common to find a MySQL installation with the default configuration. This might not, however, be appropriate for your workload and setup needs.

In this blog, we will help you to better understand your database workload and the things that may cause harm to it. Knowledge of how to use limited resources is essential for anyone managing the database, especially if you run your production system on MySQL …

Monitoring your MySQL database performance in real-time helps you immediately identify problems and other factors that could be causing issues now or in the future. It’s also a good way to determine which components of the database can be enhanced or optimized to increase your efficiency and performance. This is usually done through monitoring software and tools either built-in to the database management software or installed from third-party providers.

Prometheus is an open-source software application used for event monitoring and alerting. It can be used along with a visualization tool like Grafana to easily create and edit dashboards, query, visualize, alert on, and understand your metrics. ScaleGrid provides full admin access to your MySQL deployments – this makes it …

In MySQL 8, Information Schema was basically re-written to utilize the all-New Data Dictionary which made it faster and better in many ways. Yet it also introduces some very counterintuitive behaviors when it comes to how actual and consistent data is.

Here is a simple test.  Let’s create a table and insert a bunch of rows in it… and then check table size:

mysql> show table status \G
*************************** 1. row ***************************
           Name: t
         Engine: InnoDB
        Version: 10
     Row_format: Dynamic
           Rows: 0
 Avg_row_length: 0
    Data_length: 16384
Max_data_length: 0
   Index_length: 0
      Data_free: 0
 Auto_increment: NULL
    Create_time: 2019-12-27 01:04:37
    Update_time: NULL
     Check_time: NULL
      Collation: utf8mb4_0900_ai_ci
       Checksum: NULL
 Create_options:
        Comment:
1 row in set (0.02 sec)

mysql> select count(*) from t;
+----------+
| count(*) |
+----------+
| …