Consistency during reads have been a small concern from the adopters of MySQL InnoDB Cluster (see this post and this one).

This is why MySQL supports now (since 8.0.14) a new consistency model to avoid such situation when needed.

Nuno Carvalho and Aníbal Pinto already posted a blog series I highly encourage you to read:

• Group Replication – Consistency Levels
• Group Replication: Preventing stale reads on …

The Oracle Open World 2019 Call For Paper is open until March 13th.

MySQL track will be part of CodeONE, the parallel conference focused on developers.

We encourage you to submit a session related to the following topics:

• case studies / user stories of your MySQL usage
• lessons learned in running web scale MySQL
• production DBA/devops perspectives into MySQL Architecture, Performance, Replication, InnoDB, Security, …
• Migration to MySQL
• MySQL 8.0 (Document Store, InnoDB Cluster, new Data Dictionary, …)

Don’t miss the chance to participate to this amazing event. Submit now() here !

Last week I presented the following session at the pre-FOSDEM MySQL Day:

MySQL Shell : the best DBA tool ? from Frederic Descamps

The audience seemed very interested on how the MySQL Shell can be extended.

During the presentation I showed how I extended the MySQL Shell with two new modules in Python:

• mydba
• innotop

Both projects are on github and are waiting for ideas, feature requests, pull requests, …

Here is …

MySQL InnoDB is more and more popular. The adoption of it is even faster than I expected. Recently, during my travel in Stockholm, Sweden, a customer asked me what was the best practice to backup a cluster.

Since my interlocutor was a customer, the obvious choice is to use MySQL Enterprise Backup (known as MEB). Of course any other physical backup should be also fine.

The customer told me he was using cron to schedule his backup and was only using full backups… That’s perfect. So I told him that there is nothing complicated and that the cron job should something like:

mysqlbackup --with-timestamp --backup-dir /backup  backup

Of course, I do not recommend the use of --user clusteradmin --password=xxxxxin the cronjob but configure your crendentials using …

I already covered some information related to users password recently (see this post and this one).

Today, let’s have a look at the password management features available in MySQL 8.0.

We will cover the password management in MySQL in 5 sections:

• validation
• expiration
• reuse policy
• verification policy
• dual active passwords

Validation

Password validation means that a new password must comply with some policy to be sure the password is not weak. This job is handled by a component in MySQL 8.0: validate_password.

To be able to use that component, you need to install it. You can verify if it’s …

It seems, that this is a question that regularly shows up in forums or stackoverflow.

To start, let’s highlight the fact that in MySQL 8.0 it’s not any more possible to create a user directly from the GRANT command (ERROR 1410 (42000): You are not allowed to create a user with GRANT).

This means that to grant some privileges, the user must be created first.

Let’s create a user ‘user1‘ with ‘ChangeMe‘ as password that the user will have to change:

mysql> create user 'user1' identified by 'ChangeMe' password expire;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (1.35 sec)

Let’s try to connect to MySQL using that new created user:

$ mysql -u …

We saw in the previous post that MySQL likes memory. We also saw how to perform operating system checks and some configuration changes for Swap and NUMA.

Today, we will check what MySQL server can tell us about its memory usage.

Introduced in MySQL 5.7 and enabled by default in MySQL 8.0, the Performance_Schema‘s Memory instrumentation allows us to have a better overview of what MySQL is allocating and why.

Let’s check on our MySQL server using SYS:

Pay attention that there is a bug related to how InnoDB Buffer Pool statistics are accounted in Performance_Schema. This is fixed in 8.0.13. …

As you may know, sometimes MySQL can be memory-hungry. Of course having data in memory is always better than disk… RAM is still much faster than any SSD disk.

This is the reason why we recommended to have the working set as much as possible in memory (I assume you are using InnoDB of course).

Also this why you don’t want to use Swap for MySQL, but don’t forget that a slow MySQL is always better than no MySQL at all, so don’t forget to setup a Swap partition but try to avoid using it. In fact, I saw many people just removing the Swap partition… and then OOM Killer did its job… and mysqld is often its first victim.

MySQL allocates buffers and caches to improve performance of database operations. That process is explained in details in the manual.

In this article series, I will provide you some …

Alexey made this amazing tool that the majority of MySQL DBAs are using, but if you use sysbench provided with your GNU/Linux distribution or its repository on packagecloud.io you won’t be able to use it with the new default authentication plugin in MySQL 8.0 (caching_sha2_password).

This is because most of the sysbench binaries are compiled with the MySQL 5.7 client library or MariaDB ones. There is an issue on github where Alexey explains this.

So if you want to use sysbench with MySQL 8.0 …

Many of you already know how to retrieve the size of your dataset, schemas and tables in MySQL.

To summarize, below are the different queries you can run:

Dataset Size

I the past I was using something like this :

But now with sys schema being installed by default, I encourage you to use some of the formatting functions provided with it. The query to calculate the dataset is now:

SELECT sys.format_bytes(sum(data_length)) DATA,
       sys.format_bytes(sum(index_length)) INDEXES,
       sys.format_bytes(sum(data_length + index_length)) 'TOTAL SIZE'
FROM information_schema.TABLES ORDER  BY data_length + index_length;

Let’s see an example: