The latest from the MySQL community

MySQL 5.7 comes with built-in JSON support, comprising two major features:

• A native JSON data type
• A set of built-in functions to manipulate values of the JSON type

Despite being added rather recently (in MySQL 5.7.8 to be precise - one point release number before the 5.7.9 GA version), I feel the JSON support so far looks rather useful. Improvements are certainly possible, but compared to for example XML support (added in 5.1 and 5.5), the JSON feature set added to 5.7.8 is reasonably complete, coherent and standards-compliant.

(We can of course also phrase …

During the last few weeks I’ve been testing and playing a bit with the new group-replication plugin available for MySQL 5.7. Before continuing I’d like to clarify some aspects: the plugin is only available in labs and is not yet ready for production. The current version is 0.6. I used 5.7.9 GA running in a Vagrant 3 nodes cluster with CentOS 7.
As an additional note, I’ve tested previous version of plugin 0.5 against 5.7.8.rc and there are some good changes, so I recommend starting with the GA version.

For the matter of my tests I’ve followed instructions from this post. It’s not as straightforward as it looks; there were some issues that needed to be handled, but I finally …

Adding good content to Twitter can be a pain. I can’t do it during working hours, and I don’t have much time at night. But, the more content you have, the more followers you can gain, and the more your original tweets can be seen (hopefully). I have written several posts about using the latest Perl-Twitter API – Net::Twitter::Lite::WithAPIv1_1, so you might want to check these out as well.

– Use MySQL and Perl to automatically find, follow and unfollow twitter users

– Using Perl to retrieve direct messages from Twitter, insert messages into a MySQL database and then …

Hi all, keeping our steady release cycle, it is time again to do another preview release of MySQL Group Replication, the plugin that brings multi-master update everywhere to MySQL, like we described in Hello World post.

We are very proud to do the fifth preview release of MySQL Group Replication, version 0.6.0 based on MySQL Server 5.7.9, which introduces new exciting features, please enjoy the highlights!…

This Log Buffer Edition covers some more Oracle, SQL Server and MySQL blog posts from across the world.

Oracle:

• Should I monitor the MGMTDB database?
• Connecting MAF Applications to Mobile Cloud Service
• JRE 6, 7, and 8 now certified with EBS 11i, 12.1, and 12.2
• The database writer copies data blocks from the buffer cache onto disk. The db_writer_processes initialization parameter determines how many processes will do this task. Its default value is 1 or cpu_count / 8, whichever is greater. I found an Oracle 9 database on a …

I’m pleased to announce: MySQL Connector/J 5.1.37 Maintenance Release is now available.

MySQL Connector/J can be downloaded from the official distribution channels MySQL Downloads and The Central repository. Commercial license version is available for download at My Oracle Support.

As always, we recommend that you check the “CHANGES” file in the
download archive and/or the release notes to be aware of changes in behavior that might affect your application.

MySQL Connector/J 5.1.37 includes several bug fixes and other improvements. I’d like to …

Requires ClusterControl 1.2.11 or later. Applies to MySQL based clusters.

From time to time it is necessary to tune and update your configuration. Here we will show you how you can change/update  individual parameters using the ClusterControl UI. Navigate to Manage > Configurations.

Pretend that you want to change max_connections from 200 to 500 on all DB nodes in your cluster.

Click on Change Parameter. Select all MySQL Servers in the DB Instances drop down and select the Group (in this case MYSQLD) where the Parameter that you want to change resides, select the parameter (max_connections), and set the New Value to 500:

…

MySQL uses a cost-based optimizer to determine the best way to execute a query. It usually does a great job, but not all the time. There are different reasons for that. In some cases, it might not have enough information about the data and plan queries in a non-optimal way.  

The optimizer makes decisions based on statistics and some fixed costs per operation, but it does not understand the differences in hardware. For instance, disk access may have different costs depending on the type of storage used - SSD drives will have quicker access times than spindles, and can perform more operations in a given time. 

However, it is possible to impact how a query will be executed, and this is the topic of today’s blog. 

(Note that in MySQL 5.7, a lot of work has been done in order to improve this - users can modify the cost of different types of operations.)

This is the fourteenth installment in the …

Many years ago, I wrote about importing XML data into MySQL using ExtractValue(). The reason I'm revisiting the subject now is that I recently received an email request in relation to my old blog post:

I came across one of your blogs on importing XML data to MySQL using ExtractData() and I am trying to do the same using MySQL (5.5) database. However, I am new to this kind of method and would like to seek your expertise on this.

I have an XML file that looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
 <wovoml xmlns="http://www.wovodat.org"
 xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
 version="1.1.0" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.wovodat.org phread2.xsd">
 <Data>
 <Seismic>
 <SingleStationEventDataset>
  <SingleStationEvent code="VTAG_20160405000000" owner1="169" …

A friend of mine asked me how they could automatically follow and unfollow people on Twitter. But they didn’t want to follow just anyone and everyone. He had a Twitter account which they used for recruiting in a very narrow construction industry. He wanted to find people in the same industry and follow them – hoping they would follow him back and learn about his open jobs. When I joined Twitter back in 2008, I wrote a similar program to automatically follow/unfollow users, but the Twitter API has changed quite a bit since then. So I decided to re-write the program with the latest Perl-Twitter API – Net::Twitter::Lite::WithAPIv1_1.

Before you attempt to use these scripts, you will need to register your application with twitter via apps.twitter.com, and obtain the following:

consumer_key
consumer_secret
access_token …