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 …

MySQL 8.0 RC2 has just been released with a lot of new features compared to MySQL 5.7. In this blog post, I will list the top 10 new features that should excite developers.

These functionalities are presented in descending order of preference of our MySQL Community.

TOP 10

1. MySQL Document Store
2. Default to utf8mb4
3. JSON enhancements
4. CTEs
5. Window Functions
6. Descending Indexes
7. Better Optimizer Cost Model
8. MySQL Server Components
9. Improvement in GIS
10. InnoDB NO WAIT & SKIP LOCKED

MySQL Document Store

This is the most expected and liked feature in MySQL 8.0 … and it’s …

JSON data is a wonderful way to store data without needing a schema but what about when you have to yank that data out of the database and apply some sort of formatting to that data?  Well, then you need JSON_TABLE.

JSON_TABLE takes free form JSON data and applies some formatting to it.  For this example we will use the world_x sample database's countryinfo table.  What is desired is the name of the country and the year of independence but only for the years after 1992.  Sound like a SQL query against JSON data, right? Well that is exactly what we are doing.

We tell the MySQL server that we are going to take the $.Name and $.IndepYear key's values from the JSON formatted doc column in  the table, format them into a string and a integer respectively, and alias the key value's name to a table column name that we can use for qualifiers in an SQL statement.

 …

In this blog post, we’ll look at some of the facets of InnoDB page compression.

Somebody recently asked me about the best way to handle JSON data compression in MySQL. I took a quick look at InnoDB page compression and wanted to share my findings.

There is also some great material on this topic that was prepared and presented by Yura Sorokin at Percona Live Europe 2017: https://www.percona.com/live/e17/sessions/percona-xtradb-compressed-columns-with-dictionaries-an-alternative-to-innodb-table-compression. Yura also implemented …

MySQL is not only a relational database, but can also be used as a schemaless/NOSQL document store, or a mix of both. This is realized by the JSON datatype, and is useful for any data that is hard to fit in the ”tabular” format of a traditional table.…

The website or mobile app is the storefront for participating in the modern digital era. It’s your portal for inviting users to come and survey your products and services. Much attention focuses on front-end development; this is where the HMTL5, CSS, and JavaScript are coded to develop the landing page that everyone sees when they visit your site.

But the real magic happens on the backend. This is the ecosystem that really powers your website. One writer has articulated this point very nicely as follows:

The technology and programming that “power” a site—what your end user doesn’t see but what makes the site run—is called the back end. Consisting of the server, the database, and the server-side applications, it’s the behind-the-scenes functionality—the brain of a site. …

JSON in Flat File to MySQL DatabaseSo how do you load that JSON data file into MySQL. Recently I had this question presented to me and I thought I would share a handy script I use to do such work. For this example I will use the US Zip (postal) codes from JSONAR. Download and unzip the file. The data file is named zips.json and it can not be bread directly into MySQL using the SOURCE command. It needs to have the information wrapped in a more palatable fashion.

head zips.json 
{ "city" : "AGAWAM", "loc" : [ -72.622739, 42.070206 ], "pop" : 15338, "state" : "MA", "_id" : "01001" }
{ "city" : "CUSHMAN", "loc" : [ -72.51564999999999, 42.377017 ], "pop" : 36963, "state" : "MA", "_id" : "01002" }
{ "city" : "BARRE", "loc" : [ -72.10835400000001, 42.409698 ], "pop" : 4546, "state" : "MA", "_id" : "01005" }
{ "city" : "BELCHERTOWN", "loc" : [ -72.41095300000001, …

The VideoThe find() function for the MySQL Document Store is a very powerful tool and I have just finished a handy introductory video. By the way -- please let me have feed back on the pace, the background music, the CGI special effects (kidding!), and the amount of the content. The ScriptFor those who want to follow along with the videos, the core examples are below. The first step is to connect to a MySQL server to talk to the world_x schema (Instructions on loading that schema at the first link above).

\connect root@localhost/world_x

db is an object to points to the world_x schema. To find the records in the countryinfo collection, use db.countryinfo.find(). But that returns 237 JSON documents, too many! So lets cut it down to …

I am starting a series of videos on the MySQL Document Store. The Document Store allows those who do not know Structured Query Language (SQL) to use a database without having to know the basics of relational databases, set theory, or data normalization. The goal is to have sort 2-3 minute episodes on the various facets of the Document Store including the basics, using various programming languages (Node.JS, PHP, Python), and materializing free form schemaless, NoSQL data into columns for use with SQL.

The first Episode, Introduction, can be found here.

Please provide feedback and let me know if there are subjects you would want covered in the near future.

Last Thursday, I was introducing MySQL Document Store in Ghent, BE at Percona University.

I was explaining how great is this technology and how MySQL can replace your NoSQL database but still provides you all the benefits from a RDBMS.

This is the full presentation:

Introduction to MySQL Document Store from Frederic Descamps

Then somebody came with a nice question. Let me put first some context:

• we will create a collection to add people in it
• we will create a virtual column on the age
• we will index that column
• we will query and add records to that collection

Collection creation and add some users

mysql-js> schema = …