From Concepts to Production: Real-World Patterns, Query Plans, and What’s Next

In Part I, we introduced scoped vector search in MySQL using the MyVector plugin, focusing on how semantic similarity and SQL filtering work together.

In Part II, we explored schema design, embedding strategies, HNSW indexing, hybrid queries, and tuning — and closed with a promise to show real-world usage and execution behavior.

This final part completes the series.

Semantic Search with Explicit Scope

In real systems, semantic search is almost never global. Results must be filtered by tenant, user, or domain before ranking by …

Decrypting SSL/TLS Traffic with Wireshark and ProxySQL

In this guide, we will walk you through the process of decrypting SSL/TLS traffic to and from ProxySQL using Wireshark. By enabling the SSLKEYLOG feature in ProxySQL and configuring Wireshark to use the SSL key log file, you will be able to view the decrypted traffic for debugging and analysis purposes.

Prerequisites

Before we begin, make sure you have the following:

• ProxySQL installed and running.
• Wireshark installed on your machine.

Enabling SSLKEYLOG in ProxySQL

You can enable the SSLKEYLOG feature in ProxySQL either by modifying the configuration file or via runtime queries.

Enabling SSLKEYLOG via Configuration File

1. Open the ProxySQL configuration file (typically proxysql.cnf) in a text editor.

2. Add or modify the …

ProxySQL recently released version 2.6.0, and going through the release notes, I focused on the following:Added support for caching_sha2_password!This is great news for the community! The caching_sha2_password authentication method for frontend connections is now available. This has been a long-awaited feature …Why?Because in MySQL 8, caching_sha2_password has been the default authentication method. Starting from MySQL […]

In my previous article, Comparisons of Proxies for MySQL, I showed how MySQL Router was the lesser performing Proxy in the comparison. From that time to now, we had several MySQL releases and, of course, also some new MySQL Router ones.Most importantly, we also had MySQL Router going back to being a level 7 proxy […]

ProxySQL is a high-performance SQL proxy that runs as a daemon watched by a monitoring process. The process monitors the daemon and restarts it in case of a crash to minimize downtime.The daemon accepts incoming traffic from MySQL clients and forwards it to backend MySQL servers.The proxy is designed to run continuously without needing to […]

ProxySQL is a high-performance SQL proxy, which runs as a daemon watched by a monitoring process. The process monitors the daemon and restarts it in case of a crash to minimize downtime.

The daemon accepts incoming traffic from MySQL clients and forwards it to backend MySQL servers.

The proxy is designed to run continuously without needing to be restarted. Most configurations can be done at runtime using queries similar to SQL statements in the ProxySQL admin interface. These include runtime parameters, server grouping, and traffic-related settings.

Here, we will consider ProxySQL configured for async replication. Even when a replica is broken/stopped, ProxySQL still routes connections to replicas. It can be overcome by setting the appropriate value for mysql-monitor_slave_lag_when_null

…

This post was originally published in July 2018 and was updated in July 2023.

Now that Database-as-a-service (DBaaS) is in high demand, there are multiple questions regarding AWS services that cannot always be answered easily: When should I use Aurora and when should I use RDS MySQL?  What are the differences between Aurora and RDS? How do I choose which one to use?

In this blog, we will answer all of these important questions and provide a general overview comparing the two database services, Aurora vs RDS.

Understanding DBaaS

DBaaS cloud services allow users to use databases without configuring physical hardware and infrastructure or installing software. But …

In this blog post, we will see how to persist the password inside the ProxySQL mysql_users table in hashed format only. Also, even if someone stored the password in cleartext, we see how to change those into the hashed format easily.

Here we are just highlighting one of the scenarios during work on the client environment where we noticed that the ProxySQL mysql_users table had more than 100 user entries, but some of them were available/inserted into the clear text password, whereas some were inserted properly into hashed entries.

Before just explaining those simple commands that were used to fix those clear text entries into the hashed entry quickly, let’s see some more information about the ProxySQL mysql_users table and the password formats.

Password formats inside ProxySQL

ProxySQL is capable of storing passwords in two different formats within the mysql_users.password …

When talking about the benefits and use cases of ProxySQL with clients, one feature I generally reference is the query rewrite engine. This is a great feature that is often used for sharding (I’ve written about this in the past at Horizontal Scaling in MySQL – Sharding Followup). Another use case I reference is “temporary application fixes.” While this is definitely a valid use case, I hadn’t personally come across an issue in the wild where the application fix wasn’t trivial.

Recently, a client hit a case where pt-archiver wasn’t able to archive rows from a table that had a bit column as part of a primary key. This is certainly an edge case, but we had hoped the fix was trivial. Unfortunately, the root of the issue was around how the Perl DBI library quotes and handles the bit data type by default.

When …

With a special focus on Percona Operator for MySQL

Overview

HAProxy, ProxySQL, MySQL Router (AKA MySQL Proxy); in the last few years, I had to answer multiple times on what proxy to use and in what scenario. When designing an architecture, many components need to be considered before deciding on the best solution.

When deciding what to pick, there are many things to consider, like where the proxy needs to be, if it “just” needs to redirect the connections, or if more features need to be in, like caching and filtering, or if it needs to be integrated with some MySQL embedded automation.

Given that, there never was a single straight answer. Instead, an analysis needs to be done. Only after a better understanding of the environment, the needs, and the evolution that the platform needs to achieve is it possible …