In MySQL Character encoding – part 1 we stated that the myriad of ways in which character encoding can be controlled can lead to many situations where your data may not be available as expected.

UTF8 was designed on a placemat in a New Jersey diner one night in September or so 1992.

Setting MySQL Client and Server Character encoding.

Lets restart MySQL with the correct setting for our purpose, UTF8. Here we can see the setting in the MySQL configuration file, in this case /etc/mysql/my.cnf.

character-set-server = utf8

This change is then reflected in the session and global variables once the instance is restarted with the new configuration parameter.

mysql> SELECT …

Technical conferences are flooded with visual [mis]representations of a particular product's performance, compression, cost effectiveness, micro-transactions per flux-capacitor, or whatever two-axis comparison someone dreams up. Lets be honest, benchmarketers like to believe we all suffer from innumeracy.

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines innumeracy as follows:
innumeracy (noun): marked by an ignorance of mathematics and the scientific approach Mark Callaghan has been a long time advocate of explaining benchmark results, but that's not the point of the bar chart. Oh no, the bar chart only exists to catch your eye and …

From time to time people wonder how to implement roles in MySQL. This can be useful for companies having to deal with many user accounts or for companies with tight security requirements (PCI or HIPAA for instance). Roles do not exist in regular MySQL but here is an example on how to emulate them using Percona Server, the PAM plugin and proxy users.

The goal

Say we have 2 databases: db1 and db2, and we want to be able to create 3 roles:

• db1_dev: can read and write on db1 only.
• db2_dev: can read and write on db2 only.
• stats: can read on db1 and db2

For each role, we will create one user: joe (db1_dev), mike (db2_dev) and tom (stats).

Setting up the Percona PAM plugin

The Percona PAM plugin is distributed with Percona Server 5.5 and 5.6. I will be using …

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DBAs often encounter situations where they need to kill queries to ensure there are no long-running queries on a MySQL server that would impact performance. Long-running queries can be the result of many factors. Fortunately, Percona Server contains some handy tools to remove problematic MySQL processes. I will highlight all of the tools via some examples in this post.

pt-kill:
There have been some good posts on this blog about the pt-kill tool, like this one by Arunjith Aravindan titled “How a set of queries can be killed in MySQL using Percona Toolkit’s pt-kill.” Let’s dive into pt-kill a bit further with a few more …

The General Availability of MySQL Cluster 7.4 has just been announced by Oracle.

The MySQL team at Oracle are excited to announce the General Availability of MySQL Cluster 7.4, ready for production workloads.

MySQL Cluster 7.4.4 can be downloaded from mysql.com and the release notes viewed in the MySQL docs.

Figure 1 provides a summary of the enhancements delivered in this release:

• Performance
  • 200M NoSQL Reads/Sec
  • 2.5M SQL Ops/Sec
  • 50% …

MySQL Connector/Python 2.1.1 took a while to release and that was because we had to add some more packages which contains the optional C Extension. Note that this is still Alpha and we want you guys to report any problems and requests.

The Connector/Python C Extension was added because in certain situations, for example reading a huge result set, can take a long time with pure Python. That’s why we choose to interface with Connector/C (libmysqlclient).

Note: Pure Python is still default and it will be kept that way!

Installing Connector/Python 2.1 didn’t change much:

shell> python setup.py install

If you’d like …

MySQL Connector/Python 2.1.1 took a while to release and that was because we had to add some more packages which contains the optional C Extension. Note that this is still Alpha and we want you guys to report any problems and requests.

The Connector/Python C Extension was added because in certain situations, for example reading a huge result set, can take a long time with pure Python. That’s why we choose to interface with Connector/C (libmysqlclient).

Note: Pure Python is still default and it will be kept that way!

Installing Connector/Python 2.1 didn’t change much:

$ sudo python setup.py install

If …

MySQL Connector/Python 2.1.1 took a while to release and that was because we had to add some more packages which contains the optional C Extension. Note that this is still Alpha and we want you guys to report any problems and requests.

The Connector/Python C Extension was added because in certain situations, for example reading a huge result set, can take a long time with pure Python. That’s why we choose to interface with Connector/C (libmysqlclient).

Note: Pure Python is still default and it will be kept that way!

Installing Connector/Python 2.1 didn’t change much:

sh $ sudo python setup.py install

…

If you use Percona Server 5.5 and you have configured it to use multiple buffer pool instances than sooner or later you’ll see the following lines on the server’s error log and chances are you’ll be worried about them:

InnoDB: detected cycle in LRU for buffer pool 5, skipping to next buffer pool.
InnoDB: detected cycle in LRU for buffer pool 3, skipping to next buffer pool.
InnoDB: detected cycle in LRU for buffer pool 7, skipping to next buffer pool.

Worry not as this is mostly harmless. It’s becoming a February tradition for me (Fernando) to face a question about this subject (ok, it’s maybe a coincidence) and this time I’ve teamed up with my dear colleague and software engineer George Lorch to provide you the most complete blog post ever published on this topic … (with a belated thank you! to Ernie Souhrada, with whom I’ve also discussed this same …