Register now for the MySQL Tech Tour Event – Montreal.

Please join us for our first Canadian MySQL Tech Tour event event hosted by Oracle MySQL experts and learn more about Oracle’s strategy for MySQL, including continued investment in the world’s most popular open source database. Register for either Session 1 or Session 2 of this Tech Tour Event.

The MySQL experts will be on hand to introduce new features in the MySQL 5.5 GA release; provide details on MySQL 5.6.; and discuss the new commercial extensions – MySQL Thread Pool (performance), MySQL Security (authentication) and MySQL HA. Finally, our MySQL Experts will cover the integration of MySQL into the Oracle environment, and NoSQL access methods through MySQL.

Register for any of our sessions and learn about: …

I was giving a presentation of the MySQL’s Enterprise Monitor* application to a client recently. I was demonstrating the “graphs” section of MEM, where you can monitor MySQL sessions, connections, replication latency and more with 60+ graphs. Usually, you view the graphs from within the MEM Enterprise Dashboard (via a web browser). But the client asked if there was a way to automatically download graphs. I wasn’t sure why he wanted to download the graphs (I didn’t ask), but I knew it wasn’t possible by using MEM alone. However, in the past I have written Perl scripts to automatically download files from web sites, so I thought I would see if it was possible with MEM.

As you may know, since version 5.2.0 (released in April 2010) we support Pluggable Authentication. Using this feature one can implement an arbitrary user authentication and account management policy, completely replacing built-in MariaDB authentication with its username/password combination and mysql.user table.

Also, as you might have heard, Oracle has recently released a PAM authentication plugin for MySQL. Alas, this plugin will not run on MariaDB — although the MySQL implementation of pluggable authentication is based on ours, the API is incompatible. And, being closed source, this plugin cannot be fixed to run in MariaDB. And — I’m not making it up — this plugin does not support communication between the client and the server, so even with this plugin and all the power of PAM the only possible authentication …

A friend of mine was asking me for my recommendation of a good desktop database program to use to keep track of his inventory of cargo containers. I suggested to him that he should use MySQL and write a web page interface to do everything that he needed. He then reminded me that he is a lawyer by trade, and that he doesn’t have any computer programming experience. Then I remembered that he has almost zero computer skills. And his Texas Hold-Em skills are even worse, but I don’t mind taking his money. In his case, he should just use a notepad and a pencil. (As for the question – what is a lawyer doing with cargo containers? – that is a different story.)

If he did decide to broaden his horizons a bit, he could easily write his own software web application for creating and storing almost any kind of data. In this post, I will show you how to create a MySQL database and then the web pages needed to create new addresses, edit the same …

If you work with bazaar, you have seen its URIs. You can find the complete list is in the bzr help urlspec. Although I commonly use only a subset of that, like bzr+ssh://bazaar.launchpad.net/~maria-captains/maria/5.2-serg/ and http://bazaar.launchpad.net/%2Bbranch/mysql-server/5.5/.

In addition I often use Launchpad aliases, such as lp:~maria-captains/maria/5.3-serg/, lp:maria/5.3, and lp:869001.

And finally, there are common abbreviations that we have used in MySQL, and others that we use in MariaDB, for example bug#12345 and wl#90.

What’s annoying, I need to remember that wl#90 corresponds to http://askmonty.org/worklog/?tid=90 and type the latter in the location bar of the …

Part Two of Two: Checking on database activity when running a large DML (Data Manipulation Language) statement – such as INSERT, DELETE, UPDATE or SELECT.

Part Two: Monitoring the activity via Perl and SHOW ENGINE INNODB STATUS. (part of the InnoDB Monitors)

In part one, I showed you how to use a Perl script to insert a million rows of dummy data into a table. I needed a large database in order to test a Perl script that I would use to monitor the activity when running a large DML statement.

The original reason for creating both of these scripts was to find a quick way to see if a large DML statement was actually being executed. A customer was performing some modifications on …

Part One of Two: Checking on database activity when running a large DML (Data Manipulation Language) statement – such as INSERT, DELETE, UPDATE or SELECT.

Part One: Inserting a million rows into a database.

A friend of mine had asked a question – “Is there any way you can track how far you have advanced in a slow-moving ALTER or OPTIMIZE statement?”. A customer was performing some modifications on a database with tens of millions of rows, and they wanted to be able to see if the command was making any progress.

Since the customer was using the InnoDB storage engine, I thought of a way that you could check on the progress – but only given the fact that nothing else (major) was happening in the database (more on this reason later).

With InnoDB, you can …

For many years I was using tcsh, with lots of useful customizations, that were created during these years. Now I have bash on my laptop and slowly adding what I’ve got used to.

Yesterday I’ve created command line completion rules for mysql-test-run. It’s not a complete set of everything that’s possible, still it’s quite useful as it is. I need to type much less now when invoking mysql-test-run (and I invoke it quite a lot).

If you’d like to try it, paste the below in your ~/.bashrc:

_mtr_complete_testnames ()
{
  dir=$1
  [ -d $dir/t ] && dir=$dir/t
  testnames=`cd $dir && echo *.test | sed -e 's/.test>//g'`
}
_mtr_complete()
{
  [ -x ./mtr ] || return
  cur=${COMP_WORDS[COMP_CWORD]}
  case $cur in
    --*)
      opts=`./mtr --list`
      COMPREPLY=( $( compgen -W "$opts" -- $cur) )
      ;;
    main.*)
      _mtr_complete_testnames .
      COMPREPLY=( …

If you have ever built a form on a web page, you might have used a drop-down menu to display the choices available for a particular field. With a drop-down menu, you restrict the choices a user may select so that the user doesn’t enter invalid data (among other reasons). If a user misspells an entry, then a subsequent search for that value would not produce a found result.

A friend of mine who runs an online forum sent me an email about a problem he was having. He was trying to modify an existing registration web page using jQuery to auto-populate the state names, and then pass the state abbreviation back to his MySQL database. Believe it or not, he was actually having problems with people knowing their own state abbreviation. He had searched and found an example of what he wanted to do, but he couldn’t get it to work. So, I took the …

One of the challenges many face when running a secure encrypted MySQL backup on Linux is using managed or scheduled mysqldumps without exposing them.

1. The data – within the mysqldump backup file
2. The credentials – that are used connect into mysql

So, how might this be accomplished? I’ll show you one option. It starts with the installation of Gazzang’s ezNcrypt. Its not open source, but it is inexpensive and provides you a simple and secure means to protect and encrypt data transparently with the flexibly to map to your environment and applications.

This technique also applies to other backup tools such as xtrabackup.

This can also go along with transparently encrypting your mysql data.  I discussed this on oursql  podcast …