In MySQL 5.7.6 we’ve done some major spring cleaning within the GIS function namespace. We have deprecated 66 function names and added 13 new aliases. Please see the release notes for a complete list of all the changes. But why have we done this, and what impact does this have for you?

Standardization

GIS is a growing area, and to keep MySQL up to speed we have made the GIS namespace more SQL/MM compliant. …

The MariaDB Foundation Board has been meeting monthly since February and on Monday this week had the third meeting of the year. Here is an update on a couple of things from the meeting.

We’re happy to announce that Booking.com has renewed their support to the foundation. As a major corporate sponsor Booking.com has been offered a seat on the Foundation board. Booking.com nominated Eric Herman.  Eric has a history with MySQL dating from 2004 where he joined MySQL working on the server and tools.  In 2010, Eric joined Booking.com where he works on database scaling challenges and BigData. As a community member, he has contributed to the perl MySQL client driver, the perl interpreter, and other Free Software.  To represent community and industry interests in line with the Foundation mission, Eric Herman has joined the Board.

In the MySQL Labs version of MySQL version 5.7, there is a new HTTP plugin. The HTTP plugin documentation from the labs site provides this information (from MySQL Labs):

The HTTP Plugin for MySQL adds HTTP(S) interfaces to MySQL. Clients can use the HTTP respectively HTTPS (SSL) protocol to query data stored in MySQL. The query language is SQL but other, simpler interfaces exist. All data is serialized as JSON. This version of MySQL Server HTTP Plugin is a Labs release, which means it’s at an early development stage. It contains several known bugs and limitation, and is meant primarily to give you a rough idea how this plugin will look some day. Likewise, the user API is anything but finalized. Be aware it will change in many respects.

In …

Being schemaless is one of the key features of MongoDB. On the bright side this allows developers to easily modify the schema of their collections without waiting for the database to be ready to accept a new schema. However schemaless is not free and one of the drawbacks is write amplification. Let’s focus on that topic.

Write amplification?

The link between schema and write amplification is not obvious at first sight. So let’s first look at a table in the relational world:

mysql> SELECT * FROM user LIMIT 2;
+----+-------+------------+-----------+-----------+----------------------------------+---------+-----------------------------------+------------+------------+
| id | login | first_name | last_name | city      | country                          | zipcode | address                           | password   | birth_year | …

Incremental backups in MySQL were always a tricky exercise. Logical backup tools like mysqldump or mydumper don’t support incremental backups, although it’s possible to emulate them with binary logs. And with snapshot-based backup tools it’s close to impossible to take incremental copies.

Percona’s XtraBackup does support incremental backups, but you have to understand well how it works under the hood and be familiar with command line options. That’s not so easy and it’s getting worse when it comes to restoring the database from an incremental copy. Some shops even ditch incremental backups due to complexity in scripting backup and restore procedures.

With TwinDB incremental backups are easy. In this post I will show how to configure MySQL incremental backups for a replication …

Last  week, a SSL connection security vulnerability was reported for MySQL and MariaDB. The vulnerability states that since MariaDB and MySQL do not enforce SSL when SSL support is enabled, it’s possible to launch Man In The Middle attacks (MITM). MITM attacks can capture the secure connection and turn it into an insecure one, revealing data going back and forth to the server.

Issue resolution in MariaDB is visible through the corresponding ticket in MariaDB’s tracking system (JIRA): https://mariadb.atlassian.net/browse/MDEV-7937

The vulnerability affects the client library of the database server in both MariaDB and MySQL. But, the vulnerability does not affect all the libraries, drivers or connectors for establishing SSL connections with the server.

The vulnerability exists when the connection to the server is done through the client …

Last week I wrote up my thoughts about the Percona acquisition of Tokutek from the perspective of TokuDB and TokuMX[se]. In this third blog of the trilogy I'll cover the acquisition and the future of the Fractal Tree Index. The Fractal Tree Index is the foundational technology upon which all Tokutek products are built.



 So what is a Fractal Tree Index? To quote the Wikipedia page:
"a Fractal Tree index is a tree data structure that keeps data sorted and allows searches and …

In a previous post, I wrote an overview about Spider for MySQL with its advantages and disadvantages. Now I’ll go through a simple example demonstrating how to implement Spider for MySQL.

System information: MySQL instances information (shards):

• Server: 3 VMs (here in after will be mentioned as mysqla “192.168.56.51”, mysqlb “192.168.56.52” and mysqlc “192.168.56.53”).
• OS: CentOS 6.4
• RAM: 512MB
• MySQL version: 5.5.43 (tar-balls)
• Download link: http://dev.mysql.com/get/Downloads/MySQL-5.5/mysql-5.5.43-linux2.6-x86_64.tar.gz

…

MySQL replication isn’t perfect and sometimes our data gets out of sync, either by a failure in replication or human intervention. We are all familiar with Percona Toolkit’s pt-table-checksum and pt-table-sync to help us check and fix data inconsistencies – but imagine the following scenario where we mix regular replication with the Tungsten Replicator:

We have regular replication going from master (db1) to 4 slaves (db2, db3, db4 and db5), but also we find that db3 is also master of db4 and db5 using Tungsten replication for 1 database called test. This setup is currently working this way because it was deployed some time ago when multi-source replication was not possible using regular MySQL replication. This is now a working feature in …

An idea for a benchmark based on the “arrival request” rate that I wrote about in a post headlined “Introducing new type of benchmark” back in 2012 was implemented in Sysbench. However, Sysbench provides only a simple workload, so to be able to compare InnoDB with TokuDB, and later MongoDB with Percona TokuMX, I wanted to use more complicated scenarios. (Both TokuDB and TokuMX are part of Percona’s product line, in the case you missed Tokutek now part of the Percona family.)

Thanks to Facebook – they provide LinkBench, a benchmark that emulates the social graph …