The latest from the MySQL community

Over the years you collect datasets you have created for various types of testing, seeding databases etc. I have always thought one needs to better manage this for future re-use. Recently I wanted to do some “Big Data” playing and again that question of what datasets can I use let me to review the past collated list at Seeking public data for benchmarks.

The types of things I was wanting to do lead me to realize a lot of content is “public domain” and Project Gutenberg is just one great source of text in multiple languages. This was just one aspect of my wish list but text based data is used from blogs, comments, articles, microblogs etc, and multiple languages was important from some text analysis.

With a bit of thinking about the building blocks, I created …

It is common practice to grant your application the privileges of “GRANT SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE ON yourdb.* TO user@host”.

But what if you want to ensure you cannot DELETE data from just one table?

Ideally I want to be able to “REVOKE DELETE ON yourdb.important_table FROM user@host”. You cannot do currently this with the MySQL privilege system.

If your schema has 100 tables, and you want to remove DELETE from one, you have to define DELETE for the 99 others, and remember that for each new table, you need to remember to also modify user privileges.

Translating theory to practice is never easy. Morgan gives us the right steps in a play environment to move from dev.mysql.com native MySQL rpm’s to the new MySQL yum repository. I thought I would try it out.

1. Confirming existing packages

A necessary step, however immediately I have more dependencies including Perl DBD (used in several utilities) including MHA.

$ sudo su -
$ rpm -qa | grep -i mysql
MySQL-devel-5.6.13-1.el6.x86_64
MySQL-test-5.6.13-1.el6.x86_64
MySQL-shared-compat-5.6.13-1.el6.x86_64
MySQL-server-5.6.13-1.el6.x86_64
perl-DBD-MySQL-4.013-3.el6.x86_64
MySQL-client-5.6.13-1.el6.x86_64
MySQL-embedded-5.6.13-1.el6.x86_64
MySQL-shared-5.6.13-1.el6.x86_64
mha4mysql-node-0.54-1.el5.noarch

A further trap in the more complex real-world environments, in my case the installation of Percona …

The “Too many connections” problem is a common issue with applications using excessive permissions (and those that grant said global permissions). MySQL will always grant a user with SUPER privileges access to a DB to investigate the problem with a SHOW PROCESSLIST and where you can check the limits. I however found the following.

mysql> show global variables like 'max_connections';
+-----------------+-------+
| Variable_name   | Value |
+-----------------+-------+
| max_connections | 2000  |
+-----------------+-------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> show global status like 'max%';
+----------------------+-------+
| Variable_name        | Value |
+----------------------+-------+
| Max_used_connections | 6637  |
+----------------------+-------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

How can the max_used_connection exceed max_connections? This is possible because you can dynamically change max_connections in a normal MySQL environment. However …

To expand on Jervin’s Default RDS Account Privileges, RDS for MySQL provides a number of routines and triggers defined the the ‘mysql’ meta schema. These help in various tasks because the SUPER privilege is not provided.

SELECT routine_schema,routine_name
FROM information_schema.routines;
+----------------+-----------------------------------+
| routine_schema | routine_name                      |
+----------------+-----------------------------------+
| mysql          | rds_collect_global_status_history |
| mysql          | rds_disable_gsh_collector         |
| mysql          | rds_disable_gsh_rotation          |
| mysql          | rds_enable_gsh_collector          |
| mysql          | rds_enable_gsh_rotation           |
| mysql          | rds_kill                          |
| mysql          | rds_kill_query                    |
| mysql          | …

Help, the database is on fire. Well, it probably is but the solution may also be easy. Here are a few steps for the part-time MySQL DBA/sysadmin/developer. Total time to address this solution was 2 minutes, the inability to not go back to sleep, not priceless.

First, access to the DB server is possible, and also the mysql command line client. If you are getting “Too Many Connections” read Why GRANT ALL is bad.

Given the message “the database is on fire”, the likely cause is rogue SQL.

mysql> show global variables like 'max_connections';
+-----------------+-------+
| Variable_name   | Value |
+-----------------+-------+
| max_connections | 5000  |
+-----------------+-------+
1 row in set (0.02 sec)

mysql> show global status like 'threads%';
+-------------------+-------+
| Variable_name     | Value | …

It can be hard for software engineers to understand the following principle, however it is very important for improving performance and obtaining immediate scalability options. The principle is “Do Less Work”. That is, run less SQL statements.

Just one method to achieving the execution of less SQL statements is to eliminate Row At a Time (RAT) processing. In simple terms, do not perform identical repeating SQL statements in a loop. Relational algebra, and the Structure Query Language (SQL) specification is specifically designed to work with sets of data, or as I describe, Chunk At a Time (CAT) processing.

Customer Example

Your online social media website lets you send messages to multiple friends at one time. You enter the message, select the friends you want to receive the message and click send. While the user waits a moment and gets a success message, behind the scenes the application runs the …

What if the data you retrieved from the database did not match the data the application claimed to had successfully stored? How comfortable would your organization feel about your skills and the products that are being used to store important information if data integrity was not guaranteed?

MySQL employs a terrible default technique known as silent truncation where the product determines that it knows about your data better than you. Never has the saying “do not assume” because it makes an “ass” out of “u” and “me” been more applicable.

Customer Example

A HTML form for new customers provide input fields for the customer first and last name. Good design was considered with the HTML form client validation to ensure that each field could not exceed 20 characters in length. However, the database design is different, where the first name is only defined as 10 characters. In most cases this is sufficient, …

Anybody else noticed that Percona appears to not be a US entity any more?

I observed it today.

$ sudo /usr/bin/innobackupex ...
InnoDB Backup Utility v1.5.1-xtrabackup; Copyright 2003, 2009 Innobase Oy
and Percona Ireland Ltd 2009-2012.  All Rights Reserved.

This software is published under
the GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE Version 2, June 1991.

In previous versions this did say Percona Inc, 2009-2012.

The footer of the Documentation also states © Copyright Percona Ireland Ltd. 2009-2013.

While many attendees are repeat offenders, if 2013 is your first MySQL conference and you are relatively new with MySQL (say < 2 years experience), it can be daunting to determine which of the 8 or more concurrent sessions you should attend during the conference.

Here are my top recommendations that give you a good grounding in the various conference topics and a wealth of experience from known MySQL authorities, on important topics.

1. A backup today saves you tomorrow by Ben Mildred at Pythian. Losing your data is a terrible experience. Learn what is needed to keep your data safe and you system highly available.
2. …