The Theory

Generated Columns is a feature released on MySQL 5.7. They can be used during CREATE TABLE or ALTER TABLE statements. It is a way of storing data without actually sending it through the INSERT or UPDATE clauses in SQL. The database resolves what the data will be.

There are two types of Generated Columns: Virtual and Stored. They work with:

• mathematical expressions (product_price * quantity)
• built-in functions (RIGHT(), CONCAT(), FROM_UNIXTIME(), JSON_EXTRACT())
• literals (“2”, “new”, 0)

Besides that, they can be indexed but they don’t allow …

In this blog post, we’ll explain how to update the signing key for Percona Debian and Ubuntu packages.

Some of the users might have already noticed following warning on Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus):

W: http://repo.percona.com/apt/dists/xenial/InRelease: Signature by key 430BDF5C56E7C94E848EE60C1C4CBDCDCD2EFD2A uses weak digest algorithm (SHA1)

when running apt-get update.

Percona .deb packages are signed with a key that uses an algorithm now considered weak. Starting with the next release, Debian and Ubuntu packages are signed with a new key that uses the much stronger SHA-512 algorithm. All future package release will also contain the new algorithm.

You’ll need to do one of the …

In this tutorial, I will show you how to install a 'MySQL Cluster' on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus). MySQL Cluster is a technology to provide high availability for MySQL Databases. It uses NDB (Network DataBase) or NDBCLUSTER as the database storage engine. MySQL Cluster is designed as multi-master ACID architecture with no single point of failure, it uses automatic sharding (partitioning) to scale out read and write processes.

Many thanks to everyone who participated in this week’s webinar on ‘9 DevOps Tips for going in production with MySQL / MariaDB Galera Cluster’.

The replay and slides are now available to watch and read online:

Watch the replay Read the slides

Galera Cluster for MySQL / MariaDB is easy to deploy, but how does it behave under real workload, scale, and during long term operation?

This is where monitoring, managing schema changes and pushing them in production, performance optimizations, configurations, version upgrades and performing backups come in.

During this webinar, our CTO Johan Andersson walked us through his tips & tricks on important aspects to …

MySQL Server 5.7.16, 5.6.34, and 5.5.53, new versions of the popular Open Source Database Management System, have been released. These releases are recommended for use on production systems. For an overview of what’s new, please see http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.7/en/mysql-nutshell.html http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/mysql-nutshell.html http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/mysql-nutshell.html For information on installing the release on new servers, please see the MySQL installation documentation at […]

This blog updates Stephane Combaudon’s blog on MySQL performance tuning, and covers MySQL 5.7 performance tuning immediately after installation.

A few years ago, Stephane Combaudon wrote a blog post on Ten MySQL performance tuning settings after installation that covers the (now) older versions of MySQL: 5.1, 5.5 and 5.6. In this post, I will look into what to tune in MySQL 5.7 (with a focus on InnoDB).

The good news is that MySQL 5.7 has significantly better default values. Morgan Tocker created a page with a complete list of features in MySQL 5.7, and is a great reference point. For example, the …

Encrypt your credentials using GPG

This blog post will look how to use encryption to secure your database credentials.

In the recent blog post Use MySQL Shell Securely from Bash, there are some good examples of how you might avoid using a ~/.my.cnf – but you still need to put that password down on disk in the script. MySQL 5.6.6 and later introduced the  –login-path option, which is a handy way to store per-connection entries and keep the credentials in an encrypted format. This is a great improvement, but as shown in Get MySQL Passwords in Plain Text from .mylogin.cnf, …

I will be presenting a short lightening talk on MySQL's JSON Data Type for NomandPHP on Thursday the 13th of October. Chuck Reeves will be doing the main presentation on How the 3rd Normal Form Destroyed a Family. Get your tickets here.