Security features overview

One of Oracle's tenets is the focus on security. For this reason, when it took over the stewardship of MySQL, it started addressing the most common issues. It was not quick acting, but we have seen real progress:

1. MySQL 5.7 has removed the anonymous accounts, which was the greatest threat to security. Because of those accounts, and the default privileges granted to them, users without any privileges could access the "test" database and do serious damage. Additionally, because of the way the privilege engine evaluates accounts, anonymous users could hijack legitimate users, by preventing them to work …

I’m pleased to announce that VividCortex has just released a number of new features since our last product update. If you have any questions regarding any of the updates below, contact us!

Short URLs

You can now share links with your coworkers and collaborate in VividCortex using URLs short enough to be copied and pasted into emails and chat apps, letting you get work done faster with less hassle. Just click the Link icon in the top right of the screen and copy the URL:

When anyone with appropriate permissions clicks the link, they’ll be taken directly to the URL you were looking at when you grabbed the link. Click “Freeze Time Range” to let your coworkers see the time frame you were viewing, no matter when they click the link. For more details, take a look at our …

Percona announces the release of Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.7.21-29.26 (PXC) on March 2, 2018. Binaries are available from the downloads section or our software repositories.

Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.7.21-29.26 is now the current release, based on the following:

• Percona Server for MySQL 5.7.21
• Galera/Codership WSREP API Release 5.7.21
• Galera Replication library 3.23

Starting from now, Percona XtraDB Cluster issue …

Join Percona Chief Evangelist Colin Charles as he covers happenings, gives pointers and provides musings on the open source database community.

Have you registered for Percona Live already? The tutorial grid, the schedules for day 1 and day 2 are pretty amazing, and there is even an extra track being added, for a total of 10 concurrent/parallel tracks during day 1 & day 2. If you submitted a talk and it didn’t get accepted (competition was high), you should have received a discount code to register for the event.

I plan to write more dedicated blog posts around M|18 and the MariaDB Developer’s …

I promised to do a pricing post on the Amazon RDS Aurora MySQL pricing, so here we go.  All pricing is noted in USD (we’ll explain why)

We compared pricing of equivalent EC2+EBS server instances, and verified our calculation model with Amazon’s own calculator and examples.  We use the pricing for Australia (Sydney data centre). Following are the relevant Amazon pricing pages from which we took the pricing numbers, formulae, and calculation examples:

• Amazon EC pricing (on demand)
• Amazon EBS pricing
• Amazon RDS Aurora pricing (on demand)
• Amazon AWS calculator tool …

In this blog post, I want to go over some of the day-to-day MySQL tools and methods DBAs use to analyze queries and visualize “what is going on?” I won’t be going into the nitty-gritty details of each of these tools, I just want to introduce you to them and show you what they look like so you will know what types of information they provide.

This isn’t a comprehensive list by any means but consider it a primer for those starting with MySQL and wanting to know what a query is going to do or is doing.

The two sides of query analysis are examining a query BEFORE you run it, and then analyzing what actually happened AFTER you run it.

Let’s start with the tools you can use to predict a query’s future.

In the beginning, there was EXPLAIN. The venerable EXPLAIN command has been with us a long time as a built-in MySQL utility statement. Its purpose is to explain that what the optimizer …

Percona announces the release of Percona Toolkit 3.0.7 on March 1, 2018.

Percona Toolkit is a collection of advanced open source command-line tools, developed and used by the Percona technical staff, that are engineered to perform a variety of MySQL®, MongoDB® and system tasks that are too difficult or complex to perform manually. With over 1,000,000 downloads, Percona Toolkit supports Percona Server for MySQL, MySQL, MariaDB®, Percona Server for MongoDB and MongoDB. Percona Toolkit, like all Percona software, is free and open source.

You can download packages from the website or install from official repositories.

This …

I’m pleased to announce that VividCortex now offers 99th percentile metrics to help understand latency outliers in a query workload. These metrics provide visibility beyond the average latency, help identify the worst outliers, and improve focus on the customer experience. They are offered for all of the databases we currently support when using On-Host monitoring.

What You'll See

Latency percentile metrics are one of our most popular feature requests, so we know this will make a lot of you very happy! We actually started collecting these metrics some time ago; you’ll have p99 latency metrics for the last couple of months if you look back at your historical metrics. These metrics are captured globally for an environment, per-query, per-database, per-user, per-verb, per-caller and per-custom-query-tag.

Why Did We Choose to Implement This? 

It is extremely useful for a lot of reasons. Averages can be …

MySQL 8.0 comes with improved defaults, aiming at the best out of the box experience possible. Here we describe the changes and why they are made.

Introduction

Generally speaking, a good default is “the best choice for most users, most of the time”.…

In our last blog, we had a look at MySQL 8 and mentioned new features available here. However, some of those features are already in MariaDB and have been for a while. We will here compare database roles in both server dialects.

The Purpose of Database Roles

It’s common for numerous users within an organization to share the same database privileges. A role bundles a number of privileges together so that the DBA can set the privileges for a group of users all at once, rather than having to set each user’s privileges individually.  

With shared applications, it is not uncommon for multiple users to share the same user account. The drawback to this arrangement is that there is no way to see which actual user was responsible for which action.

Roles make managing this much easier. For example, there …