We were just leafing through the 2015 edition of The DZone Guide to Database and Persistence Management, and we noticed some interesting stats in the guide's included survey, about which we'd like to share some observations. The survey is one of the ebook's central features, and it includes feedback from over 800 IT Professionals, with 63% of those respondents coming from companies with over 100 employees and 69% with over 10 years of experience -- they represent a significant and important cross-section of our industry.

These kinds of reports can be enlightening, as they offer the opportunity to take some of our principles and pin them to the hard facts and numbers of actual database activity, in the field. 

In a section titled "One Type of Database is Usually Not Enough," the report reveals that it's stadard …

Recently we’ve received an alert from one of our clients that running threads are high on one of their servers. Once we logged in, we noticed that all the selects were waiting for table level read lock. We scrolled through the process list, and found the selects which were causing the problems. After killing it, everything went back to normal.
At first we couldn’t understand why the query took so long, as it looked like all the others. Then we noticed, that one of the WHERE clauses was strange. There, we found a SLEEP(3) attached with OR to the query. Obviously, this server was the victim of a SQL injection attack.

What is SQL injection?

I think most of us know what SQL injection is, but as a refresher, SQL injection is when someone provides malicious input into WHERE, to run their own statements as well.
Typically this occurs when you ask a user for input, like username, but instead of a real name they give you a …

MySQL 5.7 introduces both a new native JSON datatype, and a set of SQL functions to be able to manipulate and search data in a very natural way on the server-side. Today I wanted to show a simple of example of these features in action using sample data from SF OpenData.…

In this post, we’ll address how MaxScale monitors servers. We saw in the

We saw in the previous post how we could deal with high availability (HA) and read-write split using MaxScale.

If you remember from the previous post, we used this section to monitor replication:

[Replication Monitor]
type=monitor
module=mysqlmon
servers=percona1, percona2, percona3
user=maxscale
passwd=264D375EC77998F13F4D0EC739AABAD4
monitor_interval=1000
script=/usr/local/bin/failover.sh
events=master_down

But what are we monitoring? We are monitoring the assignment of master and slave roles inside MaxScale according to the actual replication tree in the cluster using the …

Recently a serious vulnerability called DROWN was found. The vulnerability exists in systems that support SSLv2. There is flaw in SSLv2 that could be used to decrypt information over newer SSL protocols such as TLS. More information about the DROWN vulnerability with CVE number CVE-2016-0800 can be found here: The DROWN attack Mitre CVE dictionary […]

The post MariaDB itself is NOT affected by the DROWN vulnerability appeared first on MariaDB.org.

Once again it’s time for another EXPLAIN FORMAT=JSON is cool! post. This post will discuss how EXPLAIN FORMAT=JSON allows the nested_loop command to make the JOIN operation hierarchy transparent.

The regular

EXPLAIN

  command lists each table that participates in a 

JOIN

  operation on a single row. This works perfectly for simple queries:

mysql> explain select * from employees join titles join salariesG
*************************** 1. row ***************************
           id: 1
  select_type: SIMPLE
        table: employees
   partitions: NULL
         type: ALL
possible_keys: NULL
          key: NULL
      key_len: …

Overview

When I got interested in Docker, I started playing idly with the idea of integrating containers and MySQL Sandbox. My first experiments were not encouraging. Using a container the same way I would use a regular server produced horrible results. I started by creating a Debian or CentOS container, installing MySQL Sandbox, and then importing an expanded tarball into the container. What happens is that tarballs of recent MySQL versions expand to roughly 2 GB of binaries. When you try to put that into a container you get a bloated file system. If you want to expand more than one tarball, you get an enormous unusable blob that is contrary to what containers should be used for. There is, of course, the possibility of using volumes, which would avoid the problem of making the container …

This post explains how you can quickly start using such trending tools as Prometheus and Grafana for monitoring and graphing of MySQL and system performance.

I will try to keep this blog as short as possible, so you can quickly set things up before getting bored. I plan to cover the details in the next few posts. I am going to go through the installation process here in order to get some really useful and good-looking graphs in the end.

Overview

Prometheus is an open-source service monitoring system and time series database. In short, the quite efficient daemon scrapes metrics from remote machines using HTTP protocol and stores data in the local time-series database. Prometheus provides a simple web …

I think one of the big announcements that came out from the Amazon Web Services world in October 2015 was the fact that you could spin up instances of MariaDB Server on it. You would get MariaDB Server 10.0.17. As of this writing, you are still getting that (the MySQL shipping then was 5.6.23, and today you can create a 5.6.27 instance, but there were no .24/.25/.26 releases). I’m hoping that there’s active work going on to make MariaDB Server 10.1 available ASAP on the platform.

Just last week you would have noticed that Amazon has rolled out MySQL 5.7.10. The in-place upgrades are not available yet, so updating …

SCALE14x was held at Pasadena, Los Angeles this year from January 21-24 2016. I think its important to note that the venue changed from the Hilton LAX — this is a much bigger space, as the event is much bigger, and you’ll also notice that the expo hall has grown tremendously.

I had a talk in the MySQL track, and that was just one of over 180 talks. There were over 3,600 people attending, and it showed by the number of people coming by the MariaDB Corporation booth. I spent sometime there with Rod Allen, Max Mether, and Kurt Pastore, and the qualified leads we received were pretty high. Of course it didn’t hurt that we were also giving away a Sphero BB-8 Droid.

The …