I’m just back from a trip in Barcelona where I presented MySQL 8.0 InnoDB Cluster (at dataops and Barcelona MySQL Meetup) and the majority of feedback was great, but I also had some comments on the demos I showed. The first one was:

This is a joke of course (maybe it’s true for some), people found it very easy and they liked it.

But then, the second one was that all I showed wasn’t easy to find, some people who already played with the solution didn’t succeeded in creating a cluster so easily… not because they had errors or encountered bugs, but more because they just didn’t know how to do it.

The goal of this …

As for each previous version, to upgrade to MySQL 8.0 you must first read the upgrade section in the manual. It’s important to know that you should upgrade without skipping a major version, so upgrade from 5.6 to 8.0 is not supported neither recommended.

Please also note that upgrades from any MySQL 8.0 RC won’t work. We support upgrade process only from GA versions.

Then one of the most important section to be aware of, is the incompatibility changes brought with the new version.

Once you have read the upgrade section in the manual and the release note of the version you want to install, with MySQL 8.0 and its new MySQL Shell, we developed …

Today, let’s have a look at the TOP 10 new features in MySQL 8.0 that will improve DBA’s life.

To shrink the list to 10 only items wasn’t an easy task, but here is the top 10:

1. Temporary Tables Improvements
2. Persistent global variables
3. No more MyISAM System Tables
4. Reclaim UNDO space from large transactions
5. UTF8 performance
6. Removing Query Cache
7. Atomic DDLs
8. Faster & More Complete Performance Schema (Histograms, Indexes, …) and Information Schema
9. ROLES
10. REDO & UNDO logs encrypted if tablespace is encrypted

Temporary Tables Improvements

Since 5.7, all internal temporary tables are created in a unique shared tablespace called “ …

You may already know that MySQL 8.0 is coming with a nice requested feature : ROLES

A role is a named collection of privileges. When you watch some slidedeck about MySQL 8.0 and ROLES, some times you can see a graph illustrating the ROLES and their eventual hierarchy. From the documentation, it seems those graphs are made using the ROLES_GRAPHML() function.

I tried it… and my first try is not really what I was expecting…

Input file

To create the input file I used the following command:

mysql> SELECT ROLES_GRAPHML() into outfile '/var/lib/mysql-files/test_roles.graphml';
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.19 sec)

Then I used yEd to …

As you may already know,  since MySQL 5.7.17, the generic partitioning handler in the MySQL server is deprecated, and is completely removed in MySQL 8.0.

So now, in MySQL 5.7, the storage engine used for a given table is expected to provide its own (“native”) partitioning handler. Currently, only the InnoDB and NDB storage engines do.

MySQL 5.7 supports generic partitions & native partitions

What does that imply for users using partitions in an earlier version MySQL  migrating to 5.7 ?

As the documentation describes it, the generic partitioning handler is still supported in all MySQL 5.7 releases, although it is deprecated in 5.7.17 and later. (Note that “deprecated” is not the same as …

With MySQL 8.0, one key feature is the new Data Dictionary.

The system tables that were previously in MyISAM are now replaced by new protected ones in the DD.

My friend Giuseppe already explained how you could see those tables using sandbox  and he also warned you that you should not mess up with them in this post too.

I’ll explain you how you can see those tables and their actual content. But will also explain why we decided to protect them and why it should stay like that.

DD protected internal tables list

The easiest way …

Sometimes when you are using a MySQL InnoDB Cluster, you might encounter some performance issue because one node becomes dramatically slow.

Why ?

First of all, why ? A node can apply the transactions slower than the other nodes for many different reasons. The most frequents are for example, slower disks (remember, it’s advised to have nodes with the same specifications), but if you are using a RAID controller with a BBU, during the learning cycle, the write performance can decrease by 10 or even more. Another example could be an increase of IO operations that will flood the full IO capacity of the system. Making a local backup or sharing the server resources with some other components could lead in such behavior.

Flow Control

To avoid to have a node lagging to much behind and try to sustain the same throughput all over the cluster, Group Replication uses a flow control mechanism ( …

So, recently we had a runaway query eat up all sorts of temporary table space on our machines. Several machines had several terabytes in their ibtmp1 file after this happened. So I set out to find out more about why the InnoDB temporary tablespace is used, why it is better than using regular files, which was what was used prior to MySQL 5.7, and how to make sure that runaway queries do not end up filling up disk space.

Unfortunately, the manual does not go into why ibtmp1 is better than one file per temporary query, which disappears once the query ends. There are a few sections to look into:

Temporary Table Undo Logs – has one paragraph that states that these are the undo logs for temporary tablespaces. Given that these are undo logs, my guess is that this makes MySQL more crash-safe. But that is just a …

Now that MySQL is upgraded to 8.0 RC1, let’s have a look on how we could check the workload and see if we can optimize something by adding indexes for example. The same technique can be used to find inefficient queries requiring rewriting.

The first thing we will check is some information regarding the usage of the user used for lefred.be’s website:

mysql> select * from sys.user_summary where user= 'wp_lefred'\G
*************************** 1. row ***************************
user: wp_lefred
statements: 65060
statement_latency: 2.71 m
statement_avg_latency: 2.50 ms
table_scans: 234
file_ios: 17151
file_io_latency: 54.83 s
current_connections: 0
total_connections: 2541
unique_hosts: 1
current_memory: 52.27 MiB
total_memory_allocated: 12.50 GiB

This was after the upgrade, so not much info yet but if I compare with the other sites hosted on the …

It was expected for a long time…. here is the fix for bug #199 !!

The bug #199 submitted by PeterZ has been fixed in 8.0. Thank you to Zhang Simon for his contribution that inspired us to implement the fix.

Let’s have a look at the test case described in the bug report, I will reproduce it on MySQL 5.7.19 & MySQL 8.0.3.

The initial steps are exactly the same on both versions:

mysql> create table a(id int unsigned not null primary key auto_increment);
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.17 sec)

mysql> show create table a\G
*************************** 1. row ***************************
       Table: a
Create Table: CREATE TABLE `a` (
  `id` int(10) unsigned NOT …