Well, “easy” if you know just a tiny bit of C++.

MySQL is well known for its ease of use, being easy to install, easy to configure, and easy to maintain. What if there is something more that you’d like MySQL to do? How would you integrate some new fancy processing library into MySQL without having to recreate the complexities in pure SQL?

MySQL Loadable Functions would be the way to go. In this blog post, you’ll learn how to set up a build environment for compiling your own MySQL plugin to be loaded into MySQL as a function. Our function will implement a ULID generator using a C++ library from ChrisBove/ulid.

Creating the build environment

The first step is downloading the …

This blog was originally published in January 2022 and was updated in July 2023.

Working with hundreds of different customers, I often face similar problems around running queries. One very common problem when trying to optimize a database environment is index usage. A query that cannot use an index is usually a long-running one, consuming more memory or triggering more disk iops.

A very common case is when a query uses a filter condition against a column that is involved in some kind of functional expression. An index on that column can not be used.

Starting from MySQL 8.0.13, functional indexes are supported. In this article, I will first explain an overview of indexes in MySQL and cover the MySQL CREATE INDEX before diving into showing what functional indexes are and how they work.

Introduction to MySQL Indexes

Working with my students to create an Ubuntu virtual environment for Python development with the MySQL database. After completing the general provisioning covered in this older post, I’d recommend you create a python symbolic link before installing the MySQL-Python driver.

sudo ln -s /usr/bin/python3 /usr/bin/python

You install the Python development driver with the following:

sudo apt-get -y install python3-mysql.connector

Create a python_connect.py file to test your Python deployment’s ability to connect to the MySQL database:

#!/usr/bin/python

# Import the library.
import mysql.connector
from mysql.connector import errorcode
 
try:
  # Open connection.
  cnx = mysql.connector.connect(user='student', password='student',
                                host='localhost', …

In the world of modern web applications, it is increasingly important to support a diverse range of languages and character sets. With the rise of globalization, the need to store and process multilingual data has become essential. MySQL, one of the most popular relational database management systems, recognizes this need and has introduced utf8mb4 in its 8.0 version as a game-changer. In this blog post, we will explore utf8mb4 and its advantages in MySQL 8.0, backed by practical examples.

Understanding utf8mb4

Before diving into the benefits, let’s clarify what utf8mb4 represents. In MySQL, “utf8” refers to a character encoding that supports the Unicode character set using a maximum of three bytes per character. However, the original utf8 implementation in MySQL does not cover all Unicode characters. utf8mb4, on the other hand, is a modified version of utf8 that supports the complete Unicode character set, including emojis …

Here, we will explore the ins and outs of MySQL DATEDIFF and its practical applications. We will look deeply into its syntax and provide you with real-world examples to showcase how DATEDIFF can be utilized in different scenarios, such as calculating age, tracking project durations, and more.

The post MySQL DATEDIFF: Function Explanation with Examples appeared first on Devart Blog.

Welcome to the 86th installment of the OpenLampTech developer newsletter. The authors whose content I share sure do make my job easy (and enjoyable). Thank you for reading.

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In OpenLampTech issue #86, we have some fantastic articles on:

• A new …

On the Internet, you can get a lot of advice from almost anywhere when you’re looking for information on how to do your DBA job.

My blog is one of these sources of advice, and depending on the source, we generally trust the advice more or less.

But sometimes advice doesn’t take the whole picture into account, and even if it comes from a recognized authority, it can lead to more or less serious problems.

Let’s consider the following situation:

We have an InnoDB ReplicaSet with 1 replication source (primary) and 2 replicas:

 JS > rs.status()
{
    "replicaSet": {
        "name": "myReplicaSet", 
        "primary": "127.0.0.1:3310", 
        "status": "AVAILABLE", 
        "statusText": "All instances available.", 
        "topology": {
            "127.0.0.1:3310": {
                "address": "127.0.0.1:3310", 
                "instanceRole": "PRIMARY", 
                "mode": "R/W", …

To continue our journey to Moodle on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure using Ampere compute instances and MySQL HeatWave Database Service [1] [2], in this article we will see how to scale our architecture using multiple Moodle instances, High Availability for the Database and Read Scale-Out.

This is the architecture we will deploy:

The same principles can be applied to other projects, not just Moodle.

Multiple Compute Instances & MySQL HeatWave High Availability

The first step is to use again the Stack to deploy the initial resources. We must insure that we use a MySQL Shape that has at least 4 OCPUs to …

Fragmentation is a common concern in some database systems. Highly fragmented tables can affect performance and resource allocation. But reducing fragmentation often involves rebuilding the table completely. This blog post will discuss fragmentation and its impact on InnoDB.

What is fragmentation?

We say that something is fragmented when it is formed by parts that are separate or placed in a different order than the natural one. In databases, we can experiment with different types of fragmentation:

• Segment Fragmentation: segments are fragmented; they are stored not following the order of data, or there are empty pages gaps between the data pages.
• Tablespace Fragmentation: the tablespace is stored in non-consecutive filesystem blocks.
• Table Fragmentation: data is stored not following the primary key order (heap tables), …

Upgrading to MySQL version 8.0 is a hot topic since version 5.7 is approaching the official end of life very soon. MySQL 5.7 EOL is set for the end of October 2023.

If you feel unprepared for the upgrade, consider post-EOL support from Percona. But it would be the worst if you proceeded with the upgrade in haste.

• Long database service downtime
• Some queries become slow
• Applications stop working due to incompatibilities
• Data loss

This is what can happen if MySQL’s major upgrade to 8.0 turns out not as you hoped for. Yes, it can be that serious, so do consider the major upgrade as an important project, not just a routine maintenance task! From my experience as a Support Engineer, I think the most frequent problem is query …