2023 is flying by and so are the weekly OpenLampTech newsletter issues. I cannot thank you enough for reading the weekly newsletter publication. But, I’ll try anyway: thanks so much! Now to this week’s issue…

The Newsletter for PHP and MySQL Developers

Receive a copy of my ebook, “10 MySQL Tips For Everyone”, absolutely free when you subscribe to the OpenLampTech newsletter.

In OpenLampTech issue #66, we have content on:

• SQL JSON columns
• Apache mod_rewrite
• MySQL Document Store
• WordPress local development cheatsheet
• And a whole lot more

If you’re not already, be sure and …

ChatGPT is the hottest topic in the tech world right now. One story even says that ChatGPT has passed Google’s Level 3 programming interview.  I wondered, does that mean ChatGPT is ready to replace MySQL DBAs, too? No. Let me show you why.

Recently, one of our clients was considering encrypting their data at rest using the Percona file-based keyring plugin. To make the process more secure, they considered removing the local keyring_file after MySQL started. So even if someone gets host access, the data files are still protected because they do not have access to the master key used to encrypt the keys for the tables running Encryption at Rest.

Let ChatGPT try its hand at MySQL administration

Let’s see what ChatGPT will say.

I asked ChatGPT the …

Previously, I wrote about our Terraform provider to deploy Percona Server for MySQL (Percona Server for MySQL: Automatic Cloud Deployment With Terraform) and Percona Monitoring and Management (Deploying Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) With Terraform). Now we also added the capability to deploy Group Replication configuration with Percona Server for MySQL, and assuming we have PMM installed (see previous post), we also can automatically add Group Replication nodes to PMM monitoring.

resource "percona_ps" "psgr" {
  count = 1
  instance_type            = "t3.micro" # for AWS
  key_pair_name            = "sshKey1"
  password                 = "password"
  replication_type         = "group-replication" …

Bloom filters are an essential component of an LSM-based database engine like MyRocks. This post will illustrate through a simple example how bloom filters work in MyRocks.

Why?

With MyRocks/RocksDB, data is stored in a set of large SST files.  When MyRocks needs to find the value associated with a given key, it uses a bloom filter to guess if the key could potentially be in an SST file.

How?

A bloom filter is a space-efficient way of storing information about a list of keys. At its base, there is a bitmap and a hash function.  The hash value of the keys stored in an SST is computed, and the results are used to set some bits to “1” in the bitmap.  When you want to know if a key is present or not in the list, you run it through the hash function and check if the corresponding bits in the bitmap are …

Thank you to everyone who joined us for the 19th edition of MyWebinar. We hope that our time together helped to elevate and seam your work to perfection. We’re committed to giving back to the opensource database community in the coming days by presenting more LIVE events.

Recently, Mydbops conducted a webinar on the top 10 features of MySQL 8. MySQL is one of the most popular and widely used open-source relational database management systems. With every new version, MySQL brings new features and enhancements that make it more reliable, secure, and efficient. In this blog, we will wrap up the top 10 features of MySQL 8 discussed in the webinar by Mydbops.

Vinoth Kanna, co-Founder from  …

Installing MySQL Workbench 8 on Windows, we discovered that the default configuration no longer sets ONLY_FULL_GROUP_BY as part of the default SQL_MODE parameter value. While I’ve written a stored function to set the SQL_MODE parameter value for a session, some students didn’t understand that such a call is only valid in the scope of a connection to the database server. They felt the function didn’t work because they didn’t understand the difference between connecting to the MySQL CLI and clicking the lightening bolt in MySQL Workbench.

So, here are the instructions to reset the default SQL_MODE parameter value for Windows. You need to edit the setting in the my.ini file, which is in the C:\ProgramData\MySQL\MySQL Server 8.0 directory. The default installation will have the following:

# Set the SQL mode to strict
sql-mode="STRICT_TRANS_TABLES,NO_ENGINE_SUBSTITUTION"

You need to change it to the following in an …

Recently, I was working with my colleagues Edwin Wang and Taras Onishchuk and found an interesting edge case involving a situation where a replica running Percona Server for MySQL 5.7, external to AWS Aurora instance version 2.10.2 (5.7-compatible), broke. I recreated the issue in my lab with a simple create database statement, as you will see below.

Error 'Character set '#255' is not a compiled character set and is not specified in the '/usr/share/percona-server/charsets/Index.xml' file' on query. Default database: 'lab'. Query: 'create database test'

The interesting thing to note here is the character set ‘#255’. You won’t see this available if you check the list of available collations in Percona Server for MySQL 5.7 for the UTF8MB4 character set.

mysql> SHOW COLLATION WHERE Charset = 'utf8mb4' and id = 255; 
Empty set (0.01 sec)

…

With OpenLampTech, each week I’m sharing the best original and curated MySQL, PHP, and LAMP stack content I can find. I hope you enjoy reading the newsletter as much as I do. Thank you for making it a success

The Newsletter for PHP and MySQL Developers

Receive a copy of my ebook, “10 MySQL Tips For Everyone”, absolutely free when you subscribe to the OpenLampTech newsletter.

In OpenLampTech issue #65, learn more about these topics:

• PHP self::, static::, and parent::
• Common MySQL errors and how to fix them
• 8 Best WordPress Gutenberg Blocks
• WooCommerce Payment Gateways
• And a whole lot more

Want to support the …

Some of the Vitess maintainers traveled to Brussels, Belgium to attend and speak at pre-FOSDEM MySQL Days and at FOSDEM. pre-FOSDEM MySQL Days # When: Feb 2-3 Who: Deepthi Sigireddi, Harshit Gangal, Shlomi Noach What: VTOrc - How Vitess achieves consensus using MySQL Replication by Deepthi Highlights # There were a lot of questions about how Vitess handles various failure scenarios. We had good conversations with both the MySQL team and MySQL/Vitess community users.

Percona XtraBackup is an open source hot backup utility for MySQL-based servers. To take consistent and hot backup, it uses various locking methods, especially for non-transactional storage engine tables. This blog post discusses the cause and possible solution for queries with ​Waiting for table flush state in processlist when taking backups using Percona XtraBackup. Only MySQL 5.7 version is affected by this, as per my tests.

Type of locks taken by Percona XtraBackup

Before discussing the main issue, let’s learn about the type of locks used by Percona XtraBackup to take consistent backups. Percona XtraBackup uses backup locks as a lightweight alternative to FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK. This feature is …