Podcasts Learning

In this penultimate episode, we talk about what's coming in MySQL 5.7 and MariaDB 10.1. Ear Candy is about a new MySQL 5.7 utility to generate the SSL RSA keys to encrypt MySQL communications, and At the Movies is about MySQL's new features.

Today, oCERT published advisory 2015-003 describing a TLS vulnerability in MySQL and derivative products.  The content isn’t exactly news – it is documented legacy behavior and the subject of an earlier blog post describing how MySQL Server 5.7 solves the problem.  That said, the efforts of Duo Security are certainly appreciated and welcomed – it provides a meaningful context to discuss how to properly harden existing MySQL 5.5 and 5.6 deployments, as well as frame a discussion on potential changes in these versions to increase security.

Vulnerability

The vulnerability described in the advisory relies on the legacy behavior of the client …

Since VividCortex launched its database monitoring platform, many users have requested some type of notification system. To address this, we took particular care in building a feature that proactively warns users of potential problems without sending multiple false alerts.

We are excited to announce notifications via email, PagerDuty and VictorOps. This post addresses basic functionalities, but please explore the feature and provide feedback to support@vividcortex.com.

What triggers a notification? Our events dashboard records behaviors such as high swap activity, disc faults, replication stopping, mysql server restarts and more. These events are grouped into incidents based on host and type. Depending on your systems, one or more of these may signal that you need to investigate further.

Do I have control over notifications? Of course. The last thing we want is an endless flow of useless …

A few days ago I wrote up my thoughts about the Percona acquisition of Tokutek with respect to TokuDB. In this blog I'm going to do the same for TokuMX and TokuMXse. And in a few days I'll wrap up this trilogy by sharing my thoughts about Fractal Tree Indexes.

Again, when I'm writing up something that I was very involved with in the past I think it's important to disclose that I worked at Tokutek for 3.5 years (08/2011 - 01/2015) as VP/Engineering and I do not have any equity in Tokutek or Percona.

Since much of the MySQL crowd might be hearing about Tokutek's "other products" for the first time I'll provide a little history of both of the products before I dive in deeper.

TokuMX is a fork of MongoDB …

About 2 weeks ago Oracle published the MySQL 5.7.7-labs-json version which includes a very interesting feature called “Generated columns” (also know as Virtual or Computed columns). MariaDB has a similar feature as well: Virtual (Computed) Columns.

The idea is very simple: if we store a column

`FlightDate` date

in our table we may want to filter or group by year(FlightDate), month(FlightDate) or even dayofweek(FlightDate). The “brute-force” approach: use the above Date and Time MySQL functions in the query; however it will prevent MySQL from using an index (see below). Generated columns will allow you to declare a “Virtual”, non-stored column …

Gcc 5.0 has added support for FDO which uses perf to generate profile. There is documentation for this in gcc manual, to quote:

-fauto-profile=path
Enable sampling-based feedback-directed optimizations, and the following optimizations which are generally profitable only with profile feedback available: -fbranch-probabilities, -fvpt, -funroll-loops, -fpeel-loops, -ftracer, -ftree-vectorize,
-finline-functions, -fipa-cp, -fipa-cp-clone, -fpredictive-commoning, -funswitch-loops, -fgcse-after-reload, and -ftree-loop-distribute-patterns.
path is the name of a file containing AutoFDO profile information. If omitted, it defaults to fbdata.afdo in the current directory.
Producing an AutoFDO …

Some of my students want to use the Fedora image that I built for my database classes in my Java software development life cycle course. As a result, they wanted a Java development environment installed. I examined JDeveloper 11g (11.1.1.7.0) and 12c (12.1.3) but resolved on the more generic Netbeans 8 (8.0.2) IDE.

JDK 7 with Netbeans 8 Download

You can download the generic Netbeans 8 IDE, the JDK 7 with Netbeans, or the JDK 8 with Netbeans for the Linux installation. After you download the executable program, you should follow these instructions to install the Netbeans 8 IDE on Fedora.

As the …

We know you are busy, and checking the VividCortex interface is not always on the top of your priority list. That’s why we implemented our proactive reporting feature.

Each day, your team will receive a recap of the top ten queries of each environment from the day prior. You can see at a glance whether systems were running smoothly or if you need to look into performance.

If daily reports are creating too much noise, you can subscribe to weekly reports instead. These will show the top ten queries of each environment from the week prior.

Of course, if you do not wish to receive the reports, simply unsubscribe.

This is the first of many proactive features to bring database monitoring to everyone on your team. Stay tuned for more, and sign up for a free trial if you are interested in a monitoring solution that …

There are plenty of storage engines out there, but none of them seem to offer fast and efficient time series storage and indexing. The existing options like RRDtool and Whisper aren’t very fast, and the fast options like LevelDB aren’t specifically made for time series and can lead to harsh operational issues. Instead of hacking on something like LevelDB to suit his needs, Preetam Jinka, one of the team’s brainiacs, decided to write his own storage engine.

Join us Tuesday, June 2nd at 2 PM EST (6 PM GMT), as Preetam Jinka covers the unique characteristics of time series data, time series indexing, and the basics of log-structured merge (LSM) trees and B-trees. After establishing some basic concepts, he will explain how Catena’s design is inspired by many of the existing systems today and why it works much better than its present alternatives.

Designing a storage engine is the easy part. Implementation is …

Introduction

Systemd is a management and configuration platform available in all major Linux distributions. It provides infrastructure for service start, stop, restart and several other novel functionalities to manage services. Systemd replaces SysV and upstart initialization systems and is the default init system in most modern Linux distributions including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Oracle Linux, Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, SLES and openSUSE.

Preliminary support for systemd was introduced in earlier versions of MySQL. However, it had the following limitations and disadvantages:

1. Use of ping tricks to check whether mysqld is ready to serve client connections.
2. Though systemd had superior process control for automatic restarts, mysqld_safe was still used to identify abnormal mysqld termination and do automatic restarts.
…