MySQL has InnoDB data encryption, and Galera Cluster has supported it since it appeared in the main server. The one thing that was not covered was the encryption of the Galera Cache (the galera.cache file).

Here is a simple extract from the binlog.000001 files.

strings binlog.* |grep Custom |wc -l
10000
strings galera.cache |grep Custom |wc -l
10000

strings galera.cache|tail -10
Customer9100
Customer9099
Customer9098
Customer9097
Customer9096
Customer9095
Customer9094
Customer9093
Customer9092
Customer9091

You need to edit your /etc/my.cnf to include:

early-plugin-load=keyring_file.so
keyring_file_data=/var/lib/mysql-keyring/keyring

Note that in this example we are using the keyring_file plugin, which stores keyring data in a file on the local server host. This is not intended for regulatory compliance. You need to use a key management server that protects encryption keys in key vaults or hardware …

The new JSON/Relational Duality support brings the benefits of both - relational tables and JSON documents - to the MySQL REST Service (MRS).

As we approach end of life for MySQL 5.7 later this year, many businesses are currently working towards upgrading to MySQL 8. Such major version upgrades are rarely simple, but thankfully there are tools that can help smooth the process and ensure a successful upgrade.

It should be noted that while the technical aspects of the upgrade process are beyond the scope of this blog post, it is crucial to create a testing environment to verify the upgrade before proceeding to upgrade your production servers, particularly with MySQL 8. 

As there is no procedure for downgrading from MySQL 8 other than restoring a backup, testing and validation are more critical than previous major version …

Everything you need to know about MySQL as an application developer, with a focus on improving query performance. After covering the high-level overview, we’ll put the learnings to the test with some hands-on examples.

When it comes to using MySQL in the cloud, customers have numerous options considering that all major cloud providers offer a MySQL cloud service. Find out who provides the best value.

The KubeCon around the Kubernetes technology was one of the events I dreamed to attend since I’m focusing on the CloudNative solutions. I had the great opportunity to attend the KubeCon & CloundNativeCon in Amsterdam with my colleague Benoît Entzmann.

There is now CNCF-hosted Co-located events adding more topics and interesting sessions. This is community-driven, vendor-neutral events hosted and managed by the CNCF. ArgoCD, Cilium, Linkerd have now their own conference. Here is the list of CNCF-hosted Co-located events.

Unfortunately, all the above events were already sold out when we decided to come at the KubeCon.

During the 1st day Keynote, Chris Aniszczyk CTO of the CNCF mentioned that for this year, the increase of the number of participants was just amazing reaching more than 10’000 people. The number of CNCF projects also increased a lot. I feel that the main message of this Keynote is that …

MySQL released version 8.0.33 on April 18th, featuring some attention-catching features.  This blog post is a quick review of the release notes looking for the exciting items, and comments in italics are solely my own.

User-defined collations are now deprecated and will be removed in a future version.  This is probably not a show-stopper for most and probably a scary situation for those dependent on them as there may not be an alternative.  Hopefully, UTF8MB4 is good enough.

The Performance Shema now has a Server Telemetry Traces service. This interface provides plugins and components a way to retrieve notifications related to SQL statements’ lifetime. We are directed to the Server telemetry traces service section in the MySQL Source Code documentation

The SSL library has been updated to OpenSSL version …

“The customer is always right” – that’s a saying that serious businesses actually say sometimes, with a serious and straight face. It’s one of those sayings rooted in good intentions and immediately polluted with the messy reality of the real world.

When you’re working in Database or even Network Engineering, the real answer is far more complicated and nuanced, but it’s much closer to “the customer is always wrong”. That is not to say that the Database or Network Engineer is right, either, though.

Usually the customer (in this case usually a Software Engineer) comes to us, or more likely pages us, with something like “the database is down”. Why? Because they got an error message like “The server has gone away” or “Too many connections” or “Host unreachable” or any number of error messages which are simultaneously too descriptive, and completely unhelpful. Such error messages are good at leading people …

Any good DBA will tell you to "select only what you need." It's one of the most common aphorisms, and for good reason! We don't ever want to select data that we're just going to throw away. One way this advice manifests itself is to not use SELECT * if you don't need all the columns. By limiting the columns returned, you're selecting only what you need. Pagination is another way to "select only what you need." Although, this time, we're limiting the rows instead of the columns. Instead of pulling all the records out of the database, we only pull a single page that we're going to show to the user. There are two primary ways to paginate in MySQL: offset/limit and cursors. Which method you choose depends on your use case and your application's requirements. Neither is inherently better than the other. They each have their own strengths and weaknesses. The importance of deterministic ordering Before we talk about the wonders of pagination, we need to …

An overview of the different ways to paginate in MySQL including limit/offset pagination and cursor pagination plus the pros and cons of each.