The latest and greatest MySQL 5.7 development milestone release (DMR) is out (changelog). It is great to see such a strong and steady cadence of development releases.  The latest one, 5.7.5, is packed with awesome features. Let me highlight a few ones related to replication.

Storing Global Transaction Identifiers History in a system table.

MySQL 5.7.5 introduces a new replication system table that is used by the server to save global transaction identifiers (GTIDs) execution history. This means that the user can setup slaves without binary logs and still use GTIDs. Such slaves may not be candidates to replace the master in the event a fail-over needs to be done – they do not have the binary log enabled – but since they save GTID history means that they can auto position themselves in the replication …

Yes, there is a simple way to do this. Although it might not be so simple unless you know how to do it, so let me show you how this can be done. It's actually pretty cool. But I'll do this over a number of blog posts, and this is just an introductory blog, covering some of the core concepts and components.

But getting this to work wasn't easy, I had to try several things before I got it right, and it's not really obvious how you make it work at first, so this is a story along the lines of "If at first you don't succeed mr Kidd" "Try and try again, mr Wint" from my favorite villains in the Bond movie "Diamonds are forever":
So, I had an idea of how to achieve replication from Oracle to MySQL and I had an idea on how to implement it, and it was rather simple, so why not try it.

So, part 1 then. Oracle has the ability to let you add a UDF (User Defined Procedure) just like MariaDB (and MySQL), …

The media train is in full steam today over the the CVE-2014-6271 programming flaw, better known as the “Bash Bug” or “Shellshock” – the original problem was disclosed on Wednesday via this post. Firstly this issue exploits bash environment variables in order to execute arbitrary commands; a simple check for this per the Red Hat security blog is the following:

env x='() { :;}; echo vulnerable’ bash -c “echo this is a test”

If you see an error:

bash: warning: x: ignoring function definition attempt
bash: error importing function definition for `x’

In addition to the recently announced 5.7.5 DMR, I am happy to draw your attention to some of our work-in-progress. This work has not yet reached production quality, but we want to share it with you in the form of four Labs releases being made available for MySQL Central @ OpenWorld 2014.

New Data Dictionary

We are excited to demonstrate the new Data Dictionary! With this labs release you will be able to run MySQL with the new Data Dictionary in action. MySQL meta-data has been consolidated in a common database schema and stored within transactional, crash-safe, InnoDB tables. Information Schema is also now implemented as standard SQL VIEWs on these tables, …

Oracle have just made availble the new MySQL Cluster 7.4.1 Development Milestone Release – it can be downloaded from the development release tab here. Note that this is not a GA release and so we wouldn’t recommend using it in production.

There are three main focus areas for this DMR and the purpose of this post is to briefly introduce them:

• Active-Active (Multi-Master) Replication
• Performance
• Operational improvements (speeding up of restarts; enhanced memory reporting)

Active-Active (Multi-Master) Replication

MySQL Cluster allows bi-directional replication between two (or more) clusters. Replication within each cluster is synchronous but between clusters it is asynchronous which means …

Oracle recently published the MySQL 5.7.5 Development Milestone release, a pre-production release providing numerous improvements to the MySQL server. You can download the release here: http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/5.7.html

This release carries some incompatible changes, as explained in the release notes and in the blog post describing the release. During my work in the Server QA team I have experienced some of these changes first hand already, and we have had to modify some tests and tools to adapt to some of it.

One very big change (well, some may not notice at all, while others may need to adjust their tools and applications) is the new default value …

September 26, 2014 By Severalnines

Paytrail is a leading e-payment method provider from Finland, and is expanding globally. Established in 2007, Paytrail currently has over 4,000 business customers, works with over 350 partners and its solution is available in all SEPA (Single Euro Payments Area) countries.

Paytrail offers a new online shopping solution that allows consumers to use one login for all of their online purchases. And it provides everything that is needed for online shopping in addition to traditional payment methods (bank e-payments, credit and debit card payments, invoicing and installments). 

This new case study describes how Paytrail came to work with Severalnines to achieve a fault-tolerant database cluster across two data centers.

Of course, this is just a catchy title. As far as I know not all system tables can be converted to InnoDB yet (e.g. grant tables), which makes the header technically false. MyISAM is a very simple engine, and that has some inherent advantages (no transactional overhead, easier to “edit” manually, usually less space footprint on disk), but also some very ugly disadvantages: not crash safe, no foreign keys, only full-table locks, consistency problems, bugs in for large tables,… The 5.7.5 “Milestone 15” release, presented today at the Oracle Open World has an impressive list of changes, which I will need some time to digest, like an in-development ( …

MySQL 5.5.40 was recently released (it is the latest MySQL 5.5, is GA), and is available for download here:

http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/5.5.html

This release, similar to the last 5.5 release, is mostly uneventful.

There were 0 “Functionality Added or Changed” bugs this time, and 18 bugs overall fixed.

Out of the 18 bugs, most seemed rather minor or obscure, but there are 3 I think are worth noting (all 3 are InnoDB-related, regressions, and serious if you encounter them, so best to be aware of them):

• InnoDB: An ALTER TABLE … ADD FOREIGN KEY operation could cause a serious error. (Bug #19471516, Bug #73650)
• InnoDB: With a transaction isolation level less than or equal to READ COMMITTED, gap locks …

I’ve been setting up a simplified lab environment to let my students learn use in class. This added content will show them how to do reverse engineering with MySQL Workbench.

It’s a complete Fedora image with MySQL and Oracle Database 11g for the course. The uncompressed image is 14GB and the compressed image is 5.3GB. I chose Fedora because it’s the smallest open source image that supports both environments, and Fedora is the closest to Red Hat and Oracle Unbreakable Linux. I’m inclined to make the instance available generally but haven’t figured out the best way to do that.

Here are the new instructions I’m adding and if you have any input leave it as a comment.

You connect as the student user, which puts you in the /home/student directory. Once connected to the Fedora OS, you open a Terminal session by clicking on Activities in the upper right hand corner, and then you …