We’ve just completed Part 2 of our webinar trilogy on MySQL Query Tuning this week and if you didn’t get the chance to join us for the live sessions (or would like to watch them again), the recording is now available to view online as a replay.

As announced in our communications, these webinars are almost 1.5hrs long, as the content is quite dense (and we got some great questions from participants as well), so be sure to make sufficient time available to watch the replay ;-)

Watch the replay

About 40% of our audience indicated that they currently either use MySQL / Percona Server 5.5 (or earlier), MySQL / Percona Server 5.6 or MariaDB 10.1, so it was an interesting mix. We also found that the majority of participants don’t have a process to check for unused indexes, which was a good opportunity to …

MySQL 8.0.0 introduces three new miscellaneous UUID functions of IS_UUID(), UUID_TO_BIN() and BIN_TO_UUID() joining the UUID() (in 5.0) and UUID_SHORT() (in 5.1) functions. See 8.0.0 Release Notes.

Thanks to the great work and hosting by Marcus Popp anybody can test out the SQL syntax of MySQL 8.0.0 using db4free without installing anything. If you want a minimal install Giuseppe Maxia provides docker minimal images of 5.0+ versions …

This blog post will look at seven bugs in MySQL 8.0.

Friday afternoon is always ideal for a quick look at the early quality of MySQL 8.0! Last Friday, I did just that.

If you haven’t heard the news yet, MySQL 8.0 DMR is available for download on mysql.com!

Tools to the ready: pquery2, updated 8.0 compatible scripts in Percona-qa and some advanced regex to wade through the many cores generated by the test run. For those of you who know and use pquery-run.sh, this should mean a lot!

[09:41:50] [21492] ====== TRIAL #39308 …

Codership’s Galera Cluster Best Practices Webinar for MySQL DBAs and DevOps Part One is now available to watch here

db4free.net was born in 2005 (which makes it older than Twitter or Google Chrome) when MySQL 5.0 was in early development. 11 years went by but one thing always remained the same: the 5 in MySQL’s major version number. MySQL versions went from 5.0 to 5.1 to 5.5, 5.6 and recently to 5.7. There was always this 5.something.

While this 5 will stay around for a bit longer, it is not alone anymore.

Now there is a duplicate of the db4free.net website at

https://mysql8.db4free.net

where you can create a database on a newly set up MySQL 8.0 server!

MySQL 8.0 is in very early development, the first Development Milestone Release (MySQL 8.0.0 DMR) has just been released on September, 12. It will take several months until there will be a final release.

db4free.net makes it easy to try new features early. The …

In a previous blog post we discussed several approaches to sharding. The most flexible one, sharding using metadata, is also the most complex one to implement. You need to design the meta-database, and build high availability not only for your application data but also for the metadata. On top of that, you need to design your application so it will be aware of the complex database infrastructure beneath - it has to query metadata first and then it has to be directed to a correct shard to read or write data. You will also have to build tools to manage and maintain the metadata. Migrating data requires caution so it has to be done carefully. You also have to make sure that any operations on the production databases are mirrored in the metadata. For instance, have you taken a slave out of rotation? This should be reflected in the metadata. Have you added a new …

This blog post will discuss how to use the MySQL super_read_only system variable.

It is well known that replica servers in a master/slave configuration, to avoid breaking replication due to duplicate keys, missing rows or other similar issues, should not receive write queries. It’s a good practice to set

read_only=1

 on slave servers to prevent any (accidental) writes. Servers acting as replicas will NOT be in read-only mode automatically by default.

Sadly, 

read_only

 has an historical issue: users with the SUPER privilege can override the setting and could still run DML queries. Since Percona Server 5.6.21 and MySQL 5.7.8, however, you can use the

super_read_only

 feature to extend the

read_only

One of the main tasks that any DBA has to deal with is certainly data retention. Especially when your developers like to store logging and tracking information inside the database. This is not something that I would recommend (don't try it at home!) but when you're late to the party (read: someone had taken this path before you joined) , then you'll have to live with it.

Data retention in MySQL is usually applied by partitioning the table by RANGE on a selected column, usually containing the row creation timestamp. New partitions are created in advance for the coming days or weeks or months, and a script is used that will run nightly and drop partitions that are older than a set retention.

There are many tools that can be used to automate data retention; I have chosen the excellent pdb-parted, a nice and cozy perl script that you can find in the PalominoDB repository on GitHub (since PalominoDB is no longer in existence, …

A new Group Replication plugin labs release has came out, a little over a week ago. Exciting news! This shows that the team has been working hard to shape up the plugin so that it meets the required feature set, performance and quality standards to be released as GA.…

I have a new blog post on blog.booking.com describing MariaDB 10.1 Optimistic Parallel Replication (with benchmark results):

Evaluating MySQL Parallel Replication Part 4: More Benchmarks in Productionhttp://blog.booking.com/evaluating_mysql_parallel_replication_4-more_benchmarks_in_production.html

If you want to know more about MySQL/MariaDB Parallel Replication and if you are attending