We are excited to announce that Vitess now supports recursive Common Table Expressions (CTEs), marking another significant step in our journey to fully align with MySQL’s capabilities. Recursive CTEs, often a critical feature for complex query handling, allow for the execution of recursive queries within a single CTE. This addition brings more flexibility and power to developers using Vitess, especially those working with distributed databases. One of the key challenges in implementing recursive CTEs within a sharded environment is managing the distribution of data across multiple shards.

This is not a comprehensive review, nor an user guide. It's a step-by-step account of my initial impressions while trying the new MySQL XProtocol and the document store capabilities. In fact, I am barely scratching the surface here: more articles will come as time allows.

MySQL 5.7 has been GA for several months, as it was released in October 2015. Among the many features and improvements, I was surprised to see the MySQL team emphasizing the JSON data type. While it is an interesting feature per se, I failed to see the reason why so many articles and conference talks were focused around this single feature. Everything became clear when, with the release of MySQL 5.7.12, the MySQL team announced a new release model.

Overview

In …

MySQL 5.7 comes with many changes. Some of them are better explained than others.

I wanted to see how many changes I could get by comparing SHOW VARIABLES in MySQL 5.6 and 5.7.
The most notable ones are:

• binlog_format: the default is now ROW. This variable affects the format of the binary log, whether you use it as a backup complement or for replication, the change means bigger binary logs and possibly side effects.
• …

MariaDB 10 is nearing GA, and it makes sense to make sure that the test suite from MySQL 5.6 is merged into MariaDB 10. Svoj is doing a lot of this work, and then we like to look at features, especially ones that are deprecated upstream. We don’t do that on blogs, but on the maria-developers mailing list.

I bring to your attention: Intermediate status for test cases merge. We see that INSERT DELAYED and SHOW PROFILE for example are deprecated in MySQL 5.6. The only way for feedback to the MySQL team seems to be comments on Morgan’s blog. However with MariaDB, especially with the feedback plugin enabled, we have an additional layer of …

In the 5.6.4 release it is now possible to create an InnoDB database with 4k or 8k page sizes in addition to the original 16k page size. Previously, it could be done by recompiling the engine with a different value for UNIV_PAGE_SIZE_SHIFT and UNIV_PAGE_SIZE. With this release, you can set –innodb-page-size=n when starting mysqld, or put innodb_page_size=n in the configuration file in the [mysqld] section where n can be 4k, 8k, 16k, or 4096, 8192, 16384.

The support of smaller page sizes may be useful for certain storage media such as SSDs. Performance results can vary depending on your data schema, record size, and read/write ratio. But this provides you more options to optimize your performance.

When this new setting is used, the page size is set for all tablespaces used by that InnoDB instance. You can query the current value with;

SHOW VARIABLES LIKE ‘innodb_page_size’;
or
SELECT variable_value …

As all you Mac users (and probably many non-Macies) know Apple released Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6) recently, even though this release was announced for September previously. Since a large part of the MySQL Workbench user base works on OS X it was clear that many of you will test Workbench on the new OS. However, so far we haven’t had the opportunity to do the same (too busy fixing bugs on released OSes) and hence we did not know about incompatibility problems there.

In the meantime several users did tests and reported us a crash on startup of the application, which means you cannot use MySQL Workbench on Snow Leopard for the time being. We are currently preparing build, test and developer machines with it and will hand out a fixed WB release as soon as possible. So, please stay patient. It’s only a matter of days.

That should read “Talks, Talks, Talks” … There will be several presentations by InnoDB experts at the upcoming 2009 MySQL Conference and Expo. Whether you’re a newbie or an experienced DBA deeply familiar with InnoDB, you won’t want to miss these important talks about InnoDB:

• Innovative Technologies for Performance and Data Protection by Ken and Heikki, Tues, 11:55am
• Crash Recovery and Media Recovery in InnoDB by Heikki, Wed, 2pm
• InnoDB Internals: InnoDB File Formats & Source Code Structure by Heikki and Calvin, Wed, 5:15pm
• …