Welcome to another post in the series of Percona Live featured session blogs! In these blogs, we’ll highlight some of the session speakers that will be at this year’s Percona Live conference. We’ll also discuss how these sessions can help you improve your database environment. Make sure to read to the end to get a special Percona Live 2017 registration bonus!

In this Percona Live featured session, we’ll meet the folks at SelectStar, a database monitoring and management tool company. SelectStar will be a sponsor at Percona Live this year.

I recently came across the SelectStar database monitoring product. There are a number of monitoring products on the market (with the evolution of various SaaS and …

Wooohoooo ! After less than one year of dedicating my blog to MySQL, lefred.be is part of the top 10 MySQL blogs !

I’m well surrounded in the ranking by my colleagues Dave and Øystein.

Thank you to all followers

In a few days, I will start my yearly travel to North America which will bring me at Percona Live at the end of the month.  But I will first stop in New York to attend the MariaDB Developer Meeting.  Let's see what will happen there.

Percona Live

Booking.com is sponsoring the conference, and we will be present at the Monday Evening Reception.  You do not need a tutorial pass to attend: any

In honor of the upcoming MariaDB M17 conference in New York City on April 11-12, we have enhanced Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) Metrics Monitor with a new MariaDB Dashboard and multiple new graphs!

The Percona Monitoring and Management MariaDB Dashboard builds on the efforts of the MariaDB development team to instrument the Aria Storage Engine Status Variables related to Aria Pagecache and Aria Transaction Log activity, the tracking of Index Condition Pushdown (ICP), InnoDB Online DDL when using ALTER TABLE ... ALGORITHM=INPLACE, InnoDB Deadlocks …

Introduction

Recently I have been involved in an effort to convert MySQL databases from a utf8 character set to utf8mb4. As a part of this effort, my team evaluated which collations would be best for facilitating a broad range of multi-lingual support.

There have been many recent posts in the MySQL community about better unicode collation support in MySQL 8 such as from the MySQL Server Team’s blog at Oracle, who have also done a good job of showing us how newer collations based on UTF8 9.0.0 will properly group and sort characters according to their case and inheritance. As the title of the latter post suggests, the “devil is” indeed “in the details”.

There is also the matter of the …

Anyone who has peeked inside a gdb manual knows that gdb has some kind of Python API. And anyone who has skimmed through has seen something called “Pretty Printing” that supposedly tells gdb how to print complex data structures in a nice and readable way. Well, at least I have seen that, but I’ve never […]

The post Making life prettier with gdb PrettyPrinting API appeared first on MariaDB.org.

This Log Buffer Edition covers Oracle, SQL Server and MySQL.

Oracle:

Compiling views: When the FORCE Fails You

Goldengate 12c Troubleshooting XAGENABLE

A performance Deep Dive into Tablespace Encryption

EBS Release 12 Certified with Safari 10 and MacOS Sierra 10.12

Oracle Database 12c (12.2.0.1.0) on VirtualBox

SQL Server:

…

Following are the few best practices and basic commands for MySQL Administration.

MySQL Access and credential security

shell> mysql -u testuser -pMyP@ss0rd
mysql: [Warning] Using a password on the command line interface can be insecure.

By looking at OS cmd’s history using history cmd other os users can see/get MySQL user password easily. It always good to not use a password on the command line interface. Another option for securing password while automating MySQL scripts is a use of mysql_config_editor. For more info on this check out my blog post about credential security.

Consider of having following implementation for Strong access policy.

• use of  validate_password plugin for a strong password policy.
• Limit …

Working with our users at Bonanza earlier this week, we saw their team demonstrate a great example of how monitoring insights can lead to a relatively simple — but impactful —  MySQL system tweak. In this case, the adjustment Bonanza made resulted in huge improvements to their total query time.

By looking at the mysql.innodb.queued_queries metric in VividCortex, it became clear to Bonanza's team there was an issue within InnoDB that was preventing otherwise runnable threads from executing. Often, when queries begin to queue, it's indicative of a problem; it's a good idea to regularly look for states like queuing, pending, or waiting as signs of potential issues. In this case, the innodb_thread_concurrency parameter had been configured to 8. Once …

MySQL environments are notorious for being understaffed – MySQL is everywhere, and an organization is lucky if they have one full-time DBA, as opposed to a developer or sysadmin/SRE responsible for it.

That being said, MySQL is a complex program and it’s useful to have a record of configuration changes made. Not just for compliance and auditing, but sometimes – even if you’re the only person who works on the system – you want to know “when was that variable changed?” In the past, I’ve relied on the timestamp on the file when I was the lone DBA, but that is a terrible idea.

I am going to talk about configuration changes in this post, mostly because change control for configuration (usually /etc/my.cnf) is sorely lacking in many organizations. Having a record of data changes falls under backups and binary logging, and having a record of schema changes is something many organizations integrate with their ORM, so …