After MySQL 5.1 was released work started on MySQL 5.2, but then this was renamed to MySQL 6.0. There were many new features introduced in 6.0. But then stabilizing this branch became as huge task. Eventually the decision was made to start of with a stable branch and backport the new features from 6.0. This is how many of the 6.0 features landed in 5.5 and 5.6.

So let's see which features 6.0 brought and were they landed. I'll use the What Is New in MySQL 6.0 section of the MySQL 6.0 Reference Manual for this.

• The Falcon storage engine. This never landed anywhere as far as I know. It's not even included in the …

Critical MySQL 5.6 bug: any user with GRANT privileges can unwillingly cause all replicas to break

The latest major release of MySQL brought us a lot of new and exciting features. As always, new features come with brand new bugs waiting to bite you in the least expected way.

I was implementing a monitoring system for a client and needed to create a new dedicated user. I went ahead and granted the usual basic privileges but later, I discovered that this user also needed the REPLICATION CLIENT privilege because the monitoring needed it to check for replication status.

No big deal, let’s grant this as well. Unfortunately I did not get it right at first:

grant replication client on database.* to user@’10.%';
ERROR 1221 (HY000): Incorrect usage of DB GRANT and GLOBAL PRIVILEGES

Ouch! My bad! This is a global privilege and I should grant it on “*.*”:

grant replication client on *.* to …

Finally! The new db4free.net Website has launched and along with it comes a new (slightly stronger) server and some simplifications with the service itself.

So what is new? Of course the new website which now is up to modern standards again, using a responsive design. While the old site was only designed for desktop (no surprise if you consider it was created in 2005 and remained more or less unchanged since), the new site adopts to small screen devices like mobile phones and tablets as well. Also the look is totally different:

db4free.net old

db4free.net new

The service now has a few simplifications. It is no longer allowed, or necessary, to …

In the previous post of this series we saw how you could use mysqlrpladmin to perform manual failover/switchover when GTID replication is enabled in MySQL 5.6. Now we will review mysqlfailover (version 1.4.3), another tool from the MySQL Utilities that can be used for automatic failover.

Summary

• mysqlfailover can perform automatic failover if MySQL 5.6′s GTID-replication is enabled.
• All slaves must use --master-info-repository=TABLE.
• The monitoring node is a single point of failure: don’t forget to monitor it!
…

One of the most frequent questions in our forums is about how to get the graphical integration when using Visual Studio with MySQL databases.

When developing applications with MySQL databases there are two basics products: a .net driver for MySQL, which is MySQL Connector/Net, and a tool to integrate all of the Visual Studio database oriented tools such as the Server Explorer window. These tools are designed to make a lot easier the creation and edition of MySQL databases when using an IDE like Visual Studio.

I was recently asked about if MySQL Enterprise Backup would be able to restore single databases.

My initial answer was that this was complicated, but might be doable with the Transportable Table Space (TTS) option.

But first let's go back to the basics. A common way of working with mysqldump is to get a list of databases and then loop through the databases and dump the data and schema to a SQL file. But both backups and restores will take a lot of time if the size of the database grows. And it's a luke-warm backup at best instead of a hot backup. So that's why we have MySQL Enterprise Backup.

MySQL Enterprise Backup allows you to make a hot backup of InnoDB tables by copying the datafiles while watching the InnoDB redo log files.

On disk the data from the InnoDB storage engine consists of a system tablespace (one of more ibdataX files), the redo log files (iblogfileX) and zero or more …

MySQL for Visual Studio is a product including all of the Visual Studio integration previously available as part of Connector/Net. The 1.2.1 version is a beta release of this product which is feature complete but still can contain minor bugs and is not suitable for production environments.

The MySQL Windows Experience Team is proud to announce the release of MySQL for Excel version 1.3.1.  This is a RC release for 1.3.x.

As this is a Release Candidate version the MySQL for Excel product can be downloaded only by using the product standalone installer at this link: http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/windows/excel/

Your feedback on this release candidate version is very well appreciated, you can raise bugs on the MySQL bugs page or give us your comments on the MySQL for Excel forum.

Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona Server 5.5.38-35.2 on July 2, 2014 (Downloads are available here and from the Percona Software Repositories). Based on MySQL 5.5.38, including all the bug fixes in it, Percona Server 5.5.38-35.2 is now the current stable release in the 5.5 series. All of Percona‘s software is open-source and free, all the details of the release can be found in the  …

This article discusses the storage (inline and external) of field data in the InnoDB storage engine. All fields of variable length types like VARCHAR, VARBINARY, BLOB and TEXT can be stored inline within the clustered index record, or stored externally in separate BLOB pages outside of the index record (but within the same tablespace). All of these fields can be classified as large objects. These large objects are either binary large objects or character large objects. The binary large objects do not have an associated character set, whereas the character large objects do.

Within the InnoDB storage engine there is no difference between the way character large objects and binary large objects …