In the last few days, there has been information released about yet another alleged data leak, placing in jeopardy “…[the] personal information on hundreds of millions of American adults, as well as millions of businesses.” In this case, the “victim” was Exactis, for whom data collection and data security are core business functions.

Some takeaways from Exactis

Please excuse the pun! In security, we have few chances to chuckle. In fact, as a Security Architect, I sigh deeply when I read about this kind of issue. Firstly, it’s preventable. Secondly, I worry that if an organization like Exactis is not getting it right, what chance the rest of the world?

As the Wired article notes the tool https://shodan.io/ can be revealing and well worth a look. For example, you …

I found this old article that shows how to setup
highly available DNS/DHCP servers using MySQL Cluster.

It uses 4 machines with 4 replicas, it describes how to do it with MySQL Cluster 7.3,
obviously today it would make more sense to use 7.5 or 7.6. In this case an extension
would be add ndb_read_backup=on to my.cnf to ensure that all MySQL servers in the
clusters reads the local copy rather than going over the network to read from another
replica.

Another tool that I found and discussed in my book on MySQL Cluster that uses
NDB for DNS and DHCP is Kea, here is an article describing how to setup Kea using NDB.

Now that MySQL 8.0 GA is out for almost 3 months, let’s see the status of how it’s integrated with Drupal, a very popular CMS using MySQL.

For people having already a Drupal site and that wants to upgrade to MySQL 8.0, please check this post.

Now if you want to use MySQL 8.0 with a fresh new Drupal 8, let’s have a look how does that work.

Drupal 8.5

Drupal 8.5.5 is the latest available stable release from July 4th 2018.

There is no notes about supporting MySQL 8.0. So let’s try it.

…

In some cases, the server creates internal temporary tables while processing statements. These tables could be stored in memory or on disk – the first option is preferred but there exist some limitations. One of such restrictions was presence of TEXT or BLOB columns in the table; as in-memory storage engines (MEMORY and TempTable) did not supported these types server had to use the on-disk engine (InnoDB or MyISAM).…

How serious are companies and the people who support their databases about security? Not serious enough it seems. How many databases are running with users with excessive privileges, OS privileges elevated? What about securing via encryption your network traffic both … Continue reading →

This post is mainly inspired by findings from the previous testing of MySQL 8.0 on TPCC workload(s) and observations from IO-bound Sysbench OLTP on Optane -vs- SSD. But also by several "urban myths" I'm often hearing when discussing with users about their IO-bound OLTP performance problems :
Myth #1 : "if I'll double the number of my storage drives -- I'll get x2 times better TPS !"

• this was mostly true during "HDD era", and again..
• (ex.: a single thread app doing single random IO reads from a single HDD will not go faster by doing the same from 2x HDD -- similar like single thread workload will not run faster on 8CPU cores -vs- 2CPU cores, etc.)
• all depends …

If you are going to be using InnoDB tables and if you plan to have innodb_file_per_table enabled, then your best option would probably be to use the CREATE TABLE statement’s “DATA DIRECTORY” option, so that you can place a table outside the data directory.
From the MySQL documentation:

DATA DIRECTORY, INDEX DIRECTORY

For InnoDB, the DATA DIRECTORY=’directory’ option allows you to create InnoDB file-per-table tablespaces outside the MySQL data directory. Within the directory that you specify, MySQL creates a subdirectory corresponding to the database name, and within that a .ibd file for the table. The innodb_file_per_table configuration option must be enabled to use the DATA DIRECTORY option with InnoDB. The full directory path must be specified. See Section 14.7.5, “Creating File-Per-Table Tablespaces Outside the Data Directory” for more information.

…

This Log Buffer Edition covers blog posts from Cloud, Oracle, and MySQL.

Cloud:

Google Stackdriver lets you track your cloud-powered applications with monitoring, logging and diagnostics. Using Stackdriver to monitor Google Cloud Platform (GCP) or Amazon Web Services (AWS) projects has many advantages—you can get detailed performance data and can set up tailored alerts.

This post is courtesy of Sam Dengler, AWS Solutions Architect. Message brokers can be used to solve a number of needs in enterprise architectures, including managing workload queues and broadcasting messages to a number of subscribers.

New Cloud …

Blood, sweat, tears and the JSON format logging is finally supported by the Audit Log plugin. This comes in pair with the feature that allows to read log events, which could be useful for rapid analysis of the audit log trail without the need of accessing the files directly.…

Amazon RDS Aurora (MySQL) provides its own low latency replication. Nevertheless, there are cases where it can be beneficial to set up replication from Aurora to an external MySQL server, as Amazon RDS Aurora is based on MySQL and supports native MySQL replication. Here are some examples of when replicating from Amazon RDS Aurora to an external MySQL server can make good sense:

• Replicating to another cloud or datacenter (for added redundancy)
• Need to use an independent reporting slave
• Need to have an additional physical backup
• Need to use another MySQL flavor or fork
• Need to failover to another cloud and back

In this blog post I will share simple step by step instructions on how to do it.

Steps to setup MySQL replication from AWS RDS Aurora to MySQL server

1. Enable binary logs in the option group in Aurora (Binlog format = mixed). This will …