Greetings everyone! Let’s discuss a 3rd Party auditing solution to MySQL and how we can leverage MongoDB® to make sense out of all of that data.

The McAfee MySQL Audit plugin does a great job of capturing, at low level, activities within a MySQL server. It does this through some non-standard APIs which is why installing and configuring the plugin can be a bit difficult. The audit information is stored in JSON format, in a text file, by default.

There is 1 JSON object for each action that takes place within MySQL. If a user logs in, there’s an object. If that user queries a table, there’s an object. Imagine 1000 active connections from an application, each doing 2 queries per second. That’s 2000 JSON objects per second being written to the audit log. After 24 hours, that would be almost 173,000,000 audit entries!

How does one make sense of that many JSON objects? One option would be to write your own parser in …

I recently had a client ask me how to use Percona Toolkit tools with an SSL connection to MySQL (MySQL-SSL). SSL connections aren’t widely used in MySQL due to most installations being within an internal network. Still, there are cases where you could be accessing MySQL over public internet or even over a public “private” network (ex: WAN between two colo datacenters). In order to keep packet sniffers at bay, the connection to MySQL should be encrypted.

If you are connecting to Amazon RDS from home or office (ie: not within the AWS network) you better be encrypted!

As there is already a MySQL Performance Blog post on how to setup MySQL SSL connections, we can skip that and dive right in.

As you probably know, the mysql client …

Yay! My first blog post! As long as at least 1 person finds it useful, I’ve done my job. Recently, one of my long-term clients was noticing that while their INSERTs were succeeding, a particular column counter was not incrementing. A quick investigation determined the column was of type int(11) and they had reached the maximum value of 2147483647. We fixed this by using pt-online-schema-change to change the column to int(10) unsigned, thus allowing values up to 4294967295.

My client was now concerned about all his other integer-based columns and wanted me to check them all. So I wrote a quick-n-dirty script in Go to check all integer-based columns on their current value compared to the maximum allowed for that column type.

You …