We are pleased to announce that MySQL Enterprise Monitor 3.2.7 is nowavailable for download on the My Oracle Support (MOS) web site.This is a maintenance release that includes a few new features and fixes a number of bugs. You canfind more information on the contents of this release in thechange log.

You will find binaries for the new release on My Oracle Support. Choose the "Patches & Updates" tab, and then choose the "Product or Family (Advanced Search)" side tab in the "Patch Search" portlet.

Important: MySQL Enterprise Monitor (MEM) 3.3 offers many significantimprovements over MEM 3.2 and we highly recommend that youconsider upgrading. More information on MEM 3.3 is available here:

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We are pleased to announce that MySQL Enterprise Monitor 3.1.7 is nowavailable for download on the My Oracle Support (MOS) web site.This is a maintenance release that includes a few new features and fixes a number of bugs. You canfind more information on the contents of this release in thechange log.

You will find binaries for the new release on My Oracle Support. Choose the "Patches & Updates" tab, and then choose the "Product or Family (Advanced Search)" side tab in the "Patch Search" portlet.

Important: MySQL Enterprise Monitor (MEM) 3.3 offers many significantimprovements over MEM 3.1 and MEM 3.2 and we highly recommend that youconsider upgrading. More information on MEM 3.3 is available here:

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The MySQL keynote at Oracle Open World 2016 announced the immediate availability of the MySQL Cloud Service, part of the larger Oracle Cloud offering. You can evaluate this now with a trial copy at cloud.oracle.com/mysql. MySQL server product manager Morgan Tocker gave two presentations at the event including a deep dive session.

This is the first release of the MySQL cloud service. As with all first releases there are some highlights and some pipeline features. All major cloud providers have MySQL offerings. AWS RDS (traditional, MAZ and Aurora) GCP Cloud SQL and Azure …

Knowing which privileges a given account has is easy – just issue SHOW GRANTS FOR user@host.  But what about when you need visibility into privileges from the other direction – which accounts can access specific data?  If you’re a DBA – or perform DBA duties, regardless of your title – you may have been asked this question.  It’s an important question to ask in an audit or compliance review – but it can be a difficult question to answer.    This post will walk through how to assess this, but if you’re impatient and need answers to this question immediately, jump to the end – there’s a simple shortcut.

Things to consider

There are a few things you’ll want to consider about the implementation of the MySQL privilege system as you try to sort out who has access to certain data.

Access type

MySQL can restrict privileges based on operations – somebody who has …

MySQL Connector/Java 5.1.38 was released earlier this week, and it includes a notable improvement related to secure connections.  Here’s how the change log describes it:

When connecting to a MySQL server 5.7 instance that supports TLS, Connector/J now prefers a TLS over a plain TCP connection.

This mirrors changes made in 5.7 to the behavior of MySQL command-line clients and libmysql client library.  Coupled with the streamlined/automatic generation of TLS key material to ensure TLS availability in MySQL Server 5.7 deployments, this is an important step towards providing secure communication in default deployments.

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Secure communications is a core component of a robust security policy, and MySQL Server 5.7.10 – the first maintenance release of MySQL Server 5.7 – introduces needed improvements in this area.  Support for TLS has been expanded from TLSv1.0 to include TLSv1.1 and TLSv1.2, default ciphers have been updated, and controls have been implemented allowing both server and client-side configuration of acceptable TLS protocol versions.  This blog post will describe the changes, the context in which these changes were made, note important differences in capabilities between Community and Enterprise versions, and outline future plans.

Context

SSL (Secure Sockets Layer)  was superseded by TLS ( …

MySQL has an extensive range of high-availability solutions to suit many different use cases and deployment needs.  This list spans from the time-tested – yet continuously-improved – MySQL replication to the just-released MySQL Fabric, giving users many certified solutions for highly available MySQL deployments.  The list is growing yet again, with Oracle Clusterware adding support for MySQL.

Oracle’s Clusterware product is the foundation for the Oracle RAC, and has been battle-tested for high availability support for Oracle database, as well as other Oracle applications.  This technology is now available as part of the MySQL Enterprise subscription, and – like all Oracle commercial products – is …

Just a quick post to note that the content from my hands-on lab at MySQL Connect (“MySQL Enterprise Features in Practice”) has been uploaded to the content catalog, and can be found here.  This includes the 36-page lab manual and example commands and programs (mostly in Java; the package includes both compiled and source code).  For those who attended the lab, this is an opportunity to complete the exercises we didn’t get to in the 2.5 hours, and for those who missed it, an opportunity to learn more about the features and capabilities of key MySQL Enterprise products and features such as MySQL Enterprise Audit plugin, MySQL Enterprise Monitor and MySQL Enterprise Security (PAM plugin).  I hope to expand on the lab content …

As a follow-up to my earlier post describing the process to create custom Advisors for MySQL Enterprise Monitor, this post will demonstrate how to create custom graphs to track metrics over time. The password policy scripts I introduced earlier will again be the basis for the data used in this post.

Collecting new data

Similar to the custom Advisor created in the earlier post, creating a custom graph starts with custom data collection.  Why can’t I just use the data collections I defined in the earlier example?  Because there’s a restriction on using multiple custom data types (defined as namespace+classname combinations) in a single graph, and in the earlier example, I used …

Quite some time ago, I published scripts to implement password policies for MySQL, and promised to show how to expose violations of that policy via MySQL Enterprise Monitor (MEM).  That stalled somewhat with other objectives, but I want to revisit it now that MEM 3.0 is GA.  If you haven’t tried MEM 3.0 yet, consider doing so – it’s quick and easy to set up.

Many people don’t realize that MEM can be extended to monitor things beyond MySQL Server health, including visibility into application state as observed from the database.  In part of the hands-on-lab I recently led at MySQL Connect, we …