As of version 0.2.1, dbdeployer allows users to customize composite sandboxes more than ever. This is done by manipulating the default settings, which are used to deploy the sandbox templates.

In order to appreciate the customization capabilities, let's start with a vanilla deployment, and then we have a look at the possible changes.

$ dbdeployer deploy replication 8.0.4
Installing and starting master
Database installed in $HOME/sandboxes/rsandbox_8_0_4/master
. sandbox server started
Installing and starting slave 1
Database installed in …

Security features overview

One of Oracle's tenets is the focus on security. For this reason, when it took over the stewardship of MySQL, it started addressing the most common issues. It was not quick acting, but we have seen real progress:

1. MySQL 5.7 has removed the anonymous accounts, which was the greatest threat to security. Because of those accounts, and the default privileges granted to them, users without any privileges could access the "test" database and do serious damage. Additionally, because of the way the privilege engine evaluates accounts, anonymous users could hijack legitimate users, by preventing them to work …

I will be speaking about the MySQL Document Store at the San Diego PHP Meetup Wednesday March 7th.  This is a great group and it is always a pleasure to head back to my hometown.

The the 8th-11th is the Southern California Linux Expo where I will be speaking again on the MySQL Document Store as part of the MySQL track and will be manning booth 617/619 with plenty of swag.

And then on March 17th I will be teaching Database Basics with MySQL at Chick Tech Austin.

I’m pleased to announce that VividCortex has just released a number of new features since our last product update. If you have any questions regarding any of the updates below, contact us!

Short URLs

You can now share links with your coworkers and collaborate in VividCortex using URLs short enough to be copied and pasted into emails and chat apps, letting you get work done faster with less hassle. Just click the Link icon in the top right of the screen and copy the URL:

When anyone with appropriate permissions clicks the link, they’ll be taken directly to the URL you were looking at when you grabbed the link. Click “Freeze Time Range” to let your coworkers see the time frame you were viewing, no matter when they click the link. For more details, take a look at our …

MySQL Community Awards take place, every year as usual, in Santa Clara, during the Percona Live Open Source Database Conference

The MySQL Community Awards is a community-based initiative. The idea is to publicly recognize contributors to the MySQL ecosystem. The entire process of discussing, voting and awarding is controlled by an independent group of community members, typically based of past winners or their representatives, as well as known contributors.

It is a self-appointed, self-declared, self-making-up-the-rules-as-it-goes committee. It is also very aware of the importance of the community; a no-nonsense, non-political, adhering to tradition, self-criticizing committee.

The Call for Nominations is open. We are seeking the community’s assistance in nominating candidates in the following categories:

MySQL Community Awards: Community Contributor of the year 2018

This is a personal award; a winner …

Percona announces the release of Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.7.21-29.26 (PXC) on March 2, 2018. Binaries are available from the downloads section or our software repositories.

Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.7.21-29.26 is now the current release, based on the following:

• Percona Server for MySQL 5.7.21
• Galera/Codership WSREP API Release 5.7.21
• Galera Replication library 3.23

Starting from now, Percona XtraDB Cluster issue …

Join Percona Chief Evangelist Colin Charles as he covers happenings, gives pointers and provides musings on the open source database community.

Have you registered for Percona Live already? The tutorial grid, the schedules for day 1 and day 2 are pretty amazing, and there is even an extra track being added, for a total of 10 concurrent/parallel tracks during day 1 & day 2. If you submitted a talk and it didn’t get accepted (competition was high), you should have received a discount code to register for the event.

I plan to write more dedicated blog posts around M|18 and the MariaDB Developer’s …

Automatic failover for MySQL Replication has been subject to debate for many years.

Is it a good thing or a bad thing?

For those with long memory in the MySQL world, they might remember the GitHub outage in 2012 which was mainly caused by software taking the wrong decisions.

GitHub had then just migrated to a combo of MySQL Replication, Corosync, Pacemaker and Percona Replication Manager. PRM decided to do a failover after failing health checks on the master, which was overloaded during a schema migration. A new master was selected, but it performed poorly because of cold caches. The high query load from the busy site caused PRM heartbeats to fail again on the cold master, and PRM then triggered another failover …

I promised to do a pricing post on the Amazon RDS Aurora MySQL pricing, so here we go.  All pricing is noted in USD (we’ll explain why)

We compared pricing of equivalent EC2+EBS server instances, and verified our calculation model with Amazon’s own calculator and examples.  We use the pricing for Australia (Sydney data centre). Following are the relevant Amazon pricing pages from which we took the pricing numbers, formulae, and calculation examples:

• Amazon EC pricing (on demand)
• Amazon EBS pricing
• Amazon RDS Aurora pricing (on demand)
• Amazon AWS calculator tool …

In this blog post, I want to go over some of the day-to-day MySQL tools and methods DBAs use to analyze queries and visualize “what is going on?” I won’t be going into the nitty-gritty details of each of these tools, I just want to introduce you to them and show you what they look like so you will know what types of information they provide.

This isn’t a comprehensive list by any means but consider it a primer for those starting with MySQL and wanting to know what a query is going to do or is doing.

The two sides of query analysis are examining a query BEFORE you run it, and then analyzing what actually happened AFTER you run it.

Let’s start with the tools you can use to predict a query’s future.

In the beginning, there was EXPLAIN. The venerable EXPLAIN command has been with us a long time as a built-in MySQL utility statement. Its purpose is to explain that what the optimizer …