MySQL 5.6.25 was recently released (it is the latest MySQL 5.6, is GA), and is available for download here.

For this release, there are 2 “Functionality Added or Changed” items of note:

• Functionality Added/Changed: MySQL distributions now include an innodb_stress suite of test cases. Thanks to Mark Callaghan for the contribution. (Bug #76347)
• Functionality Added/Changed: my_print_defaults now masks passwords. To display passwords in cleartext, use the new –show option.

In addition to those, there were 55 other bug fixes:

• 10 InnoDB
•   8 Replication
•   3 Partitioning (one overlaps w/ an InnoDB bug fix)
• 35 Miscellaneous (and 6 of …

Last week I hosted a webinar on using MySQL in the cloud for High Availability (HA) alongside 451 Research analyst Jason Stamper. You can watch the recording and also download the slides (free) here. Just click the “Register” button at the end of that page.

We had several excellent questions and we didn’t have time to get to several of them in the allotted time. I’m posting them here along with the answers. Feel free to ask follow-up questions in the comments below.

Q: Can the TokuDB engine be used in a PXC environment?

A: No, TokuDB cannot currently be used in a PXC environment, the only supported engine in …

Goodies… but not the kind you can eat

You’re probably wondering, “What does this dandelion picture have to do with dates?” I wondered the same thing when I typed “calendar” into the image search box. Forget the dandelion. Let’s talk date table fun. On to the “goodies” I promised.In case you missed it, I posted earlier about the wonder of a “dates” table (Dates Tables (More Numbers Table Sugar)) I said I would probably make posts about why it is so wonderful. I like to deliver on what I promise.

Since the previous posts use MySQL, this will also use MySQL syntax in places. Considering how prevalent it is I’m sure not many people will complain.

For those who want to complain, you may insert into this table I created:

CREATE TABLE complaints ( complaint_id int unsigned auto_increment, …

Download MariaDB 10.0.20

Release Notes Changelog What is MariaDB 10.0?

MariaDB APT and YUM Repository Configuration Generator

The MariaDB project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of MariaDB 10.0.20. This is a Stable (GA) release.

See the Release Notes and …

In this post we will use the MySQL 5.7.7 labs release which has support for JSON documents stored in a special data type. We will be using Connector/Python and show how to get going with updating documents and getting data out.

Required read

If you wonder what this is all about, please check the following great reads from the MySQL Server team:

• JSON Labs Release: Native JSON Data Type and Binary Format
• JSON Labs Release: JSON Functions, Part 2 — Querying …

mydumper is a a tool for fast reliable logical backups. It is an alternative to mysqldump and has many advantages over mysqldump some of which are listed below:

• Multi-threaded backup tool which makes it a lot faster then mysqldump, as mysqldump is single threaded. This is especially helpful if you have very fast storage such as SSDs which can be much better utilized with multiple threads.
• The tool produces separate files for separate tables instead of one big monolithic file, making it easy to restore single tables. You can even chunk the table into multiple files which is super useful for cases where you have very large tables.
• The tool allows for multi-threaded restores, making restores an order of magnitude faster in comparison to restoring from mysqldump produced backups. This is especially true for large datasets.
• The tool provides in-built compression, so that the backup files are written in …

MySQL recently added support for JSON data with MySQL 5.7.8.  It would be cool to store JSON data in TokuDB tables.

First, I had to get TokuDB running on MySQL 5.7.8.   TokuDB currently runs on Percona Server 5.6, and various flavors of MariaDB.  The only issues porting TokuDB to MySQL 5.7 were adopting the changes to various internal APIs that storage engines use.  Since I did not make any patches to the MySQL code,  some TokuDB features including clustered secondary keys and selection of various compression algorithms …

When a new version of MySQL is about to be released we read a lot of blog posts about the performance and scalability improvements. That’s good but sometimes we miss some small features that can help us a lot in our day-to-day tasks. One good example is the blog post that Aurimas wrote about a new small feature in MySQL 5.6 that I didn’t know about until I read it: the Automatic InnoDB transaction log file size change. How cool is that?

I plan to write a series of blog posts that will show some of those small new features in MySQL 5.7 that are going to be really useful. I’m going to start with EXPLAIN FOR CONNECTION.

This feature allows us to run an EXPLAIN for an already running statement. Let’s say that you find a query …

In a post, written a few months ago, I found that using EXT4 transactions with the “data=journal” mount option, improves the write performance significantly, by 55%, without putting data at risk. Many people commented on the post mentioning they were not able to reproduce the results and thus, I decided to further investigate in order to find out why my results were different.

So, I ran sysbench benchmarks on a few servers and found when the InnoDB double-write buffer limitations occur and when they don’t. I also made sure some of my colleagues were able to reproduce the results. Basically, in order to reproduce the results you need the following conditions:

• Spinning disk (no SSD)
• Enough CPU power
• A dataset that fits in the InnoDB buffer pool
• A continuous high write …

With the shipment of the first release candidate (RC) of MySQL 5.7, the next major version of the server is rapidly shaping up. Over the course of the nearly two and a half years that have passed since 5.6 went GA, we have put a lot of work into streamlining the server code in order to ease the burden of developing and maintaining such a large product and codebase.

An important aspect of this work is deprecation and removal. To explain the terms, deprecating a feature means that we signal to the outside world that “this feature is available now, but it will be removed in a future release, so please adjust your use case accordingly”. Removing a feature means just that – in one version the feature is available, but then it is gone, and if you try to use it, you will get an error message saying that the feature is unknown.

Generally we don’t remove features in existing GA releases, but we …