Oracle has released the Critical Patch Update (CPU) advisory for January 2014.

The affected MySQL products are:

• Oracle MySQL Enterprise Monitor, versions 2.3, 3.0 

• Oracle MySQL Server, versions 5.1, 5.5, 5.6

So this means that you should consider updating MySQL. For MySQL Enterprise the updates should be available on My Oracle Support and for the Community version the new versions are on the regular download locations. I guess the official repositories are already updated.

For MySQL 5.6 you should upgrade to 5.6.15
For MySQL 5.5 you should upgrade to 5.5.35
For MySQL 5.1 you should upgrade to 5.1.73

If you use the MySQL release from your distribution …

A question often comes when talking about indexing: should we use multiple column indexes or multiple indexes on single columns? Peter Zaitsev wrote about it back in 2008 and the conclusion then was that a multiple column index is most often the best solution. But with all the recent optimizer improvements, is there anything different with MySQL 5.6?

Setup

For this test, we will use these 2 tables (same structure as in Peter’s post):

CREATE TABLE t1000merge (
  id int not null auto_increment primary key,
  i int(11) NOT NULL,
  j int(11) NOT NULL,
  val char(10) NOT NULL,
  KEY i (i),
  KEY j (j)
) ENGINE=InnoDB;
CREATE TABLE t1000idx2 (
  id int not null auto_increment primary key,
  i int(11) NOT NULL,
  j int(11) NOT NULL,
  val char(10) NOT NULL,
  KEY ij (i,j)
) ENGINE=InnoDB;

Tables were …

In many parts of the MySQL world, whether you have users, developers or administrators of MySQL, the season holidays are for family, relax, prayers, travel, or they are simply a moment where you can enjoy what you like or care most about.

For me, this time is dedicated to my family, but also to deeper thoughts around the strategies to adopt in short and long term. My work nowadays, as the work of many others, is ruled by quick decisions, by the "time to market” - whatever “market" means in a specific context. Decisions must be made in meetings that are time-boxed in one hour or even less. In the end, you accumulate so much work and high priority tasks that you do not have enough time to prepare the topics adequately.

I thought I could summarise my thoughts for the past year and for the near future, from a technical and from a business perspective.

A transient 2013To me, 2013 was a transient …

Since MariaDB aims to be a compatible/drop-in replacement to MySQL, its crucial that in 10.0 we support all the 5.6 options/system variables, else we have to clearly document them in the Knowledgebase article MariaDB versus MySQL – Compatibility.

To this extent, Sergey Vojtovich (svoj) has created MDEV-5277 as a tracker. There is also plenty of discussion on this topic at the maria-developers mailing list. I encourage current users of MySQL 5.6 to take a look at the list and comment either in Jira or on the mailing list to ensure that when …

A few years ago Yves Trudeau and Aleksandr Kuzminsky wrote posts about different ways for recovering orphaned .ibd files:

• Connecting orphaned .ibd files
• A recovery trivia or how to recover from a lost ibdata1 file

Today I want to show you how to do that in more easy and quick way. In my example I’ll restore a “payment.ibd” file (payment table) from Sakila DB on a server with MySQL 5.5 (but with …

There’s a lot to love about the MySQL product documentation – a lot of hard work from a number of very talented Oracle staff goes into it (not to mention the helpful suggestions and feedback from the community).  There is, however, one page I find myself coming back to again and again, despite the fact that it’s somewhat hard to find.  This is the MySQL Server options/variable reference page.  It’s a helpful table that lists every MySQL Server option or variable, what version it was introduced or deprecated in, whether it’s dynamic or not, whether variables have session/global/both scope, and links to the version-specific documentation for that variable (useful to know when default values changed, for example).

It always takes me a while to find this page again when I’m looking for it, as it’s …

In MySQL 5.6 InnoDB has a dedicated thread (page_cleaner) that’s responsible for performing flushing operations. Page_cleaner performs flushing of the dirty pages from the buffer pool based on two factors:
- access pattern  -  the least recently used pages will be flushed by LRU flusher from LRU_list when buffer pool has no free pages anymore;
- age – the oldest modified non-flushed pages are part of flush_list structure and will be flushed by flush_list flusher based on several heuristics.

There is a good overview of the page_cleaner and also here you may find some details about flushing in MySQL 5.6. Below I describe several additional aspects of the flush_list flushing that was not really …

I want to thank all attendees of my webinar, “MySQL 5.6 New Replication Features: Benefits, Challenges and Limitations“. We had questions that I didn’t have the time to answer:

Q: If I run on Amazon’s RDS, do I need to worry about enabling crash-safe slaves, or is that already in place?

A: Crash-safe replication is already configured for read replicas using MySQL 5.6.

Q: How the relay log purge will manage in case of multiple db’s replication running on multiple threads?

A: Same thing as with single-threaded replication: when all event in a relay log file have been executed, …

The procedure for using the PAM authentication plugin as documented doesn't work flawlessly on Ubuntu.

So here is how it works on Ubuntu (and probably also on other Debian based systems).

Please note that the PAM authentication plugin is an enterprise feature.

1. Make sure the plugin is loaded

This can be done by adding the following to the mysqld section of my.cnf (Don't forget to restart). You could also use INSTALL PLUGIN to load it without restart.

plugin-load=authentication_pam.so

2.  Add a user which will use the plugin

mysql> CREATE USER 'dveeden'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED WITH authentication_pam;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

3. Add a pam config file for 'mysql':
Create /etc/pam.d/mysql with the following …

I was a bit wrong in my previous post. MySQL 5.6 does allow you to supply a fsp with CURRENT_TIMESTAMP (thanks Roy).

mysql> SELECT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP,CURRENT_TIMESTAMP(6);
+---------------------+----------------------------+
| CURRENT_TIMESTAMP   | CURRENT_TIMESTAMP(6)       |
+---------------------+----------------------------+
| 2013-10-27 10:38:59 | 2013-10-27 10:38:59.182530 |
+---------------------+----------------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

It however feels a bit weird to me as the CURRENT_TIMESTAMP is often used without () and doesn't look like a function. So when I tried to use a CURRENT_TIMESTAMP with a fsp of 6 it was not behaving how I expected it to be:

mysql> CREATE TABLE t1 (ts TIMESTAMP DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP(6));
ERROR 1067 (42000): Invalid …