Recently during my several talks and trips to meet the MySQL Community and MySQL InnoDB Cluster, I realized that some important message was missing. I got a lot of questions about which version of Router or Shell people should use. There is some confusion about which version to use, it seems that people thinks they should use MySQL Shell 1.0.x and MySQL Router 2.1.x with MySQL 5.7 and use the 8.0.x version having the same version as MySQL 8.0. This is wrong !

In fact, whatever the version of MySQL InnoDB Cluster you are using, you should ALWAYS use the latest version of Router and Shell. Currently it’s 8.0.11. So yes, even if you use MySQL 5.7.22, you MUST use MySQL Router 8.0.11 and …

Percona announces the GA release of Percona Server for MySQL 5.7.22-22 on on May 31, 2018. Download the latest version from the Percona web site or the Percona Software Repositories. You can also run Docker containers from the images in the Docker Hub repository.

Based on MySQL 5.7.22, including all the bug fixes in it, Percona Server for MySQL 5.7.22-22 is the current GA release in the Percona Server for MySQL 5.7 series. Percona …

Percona announces the GA release of Percona Server for MySQL 5.7.21-21 on on April 24, 2018. Download the latest version from the Percona web site or the Percona Software Repositories. You can also run Docker containers from the images in the Docker Hub repository.

This version of Percona Server for MySQL 5.7.21 includes three new encryption features – Vault keyring plug-in, encryption for InnoDB general tablespaces, and encryption for binary log files.

These new capabilities, which allow companies to immediately …

Recently I blogged about the new default authentication plugin in MySQL 8.0 and I got some comments complaining that this new authentication plugin is breaking half of applications.

So first of all, if you are using an old connector or a connector (like the one for Go) not yet supporting caching_sha2_passwordas authentication plugin, you are still able to use the old one. If you have created a new user for your application not supporting the new authentication method, you just have to run the …

The latest release of dbdeployer is possibly the last one with a leading 0. If no serious bugs are found in the next two weeks, the next release will bear a glorious 1.0.

Latest news

The decision to get out of the stream of pre-releases that were published until now comes because I have implemented all the features that I wanted to add: mainly, all the ones that I wished to add to MySQL-Sandbox but it would have been …

Version 0.3.0 of dbdeployer has gained the ability of deploying multiple sandboxes concurrently. Whenever we deploy a group of sandboxes (replication, multiple) we can use the --concurrent flag, telling dbdeployer that it should run operations concurrently.

What happens when a single sandbox gets deployed? There are six sets of operations:

1. Create the sandbox directory and write down its scripts;
2. Run the initialisation script;
3. Start the database server;
4. Run the pre-grants SQL commands (if any;)
5. Load the grants;
…

Security features overview

One of Oracle's tenets is the focus on security. For this reason, when it took over the stewardship of MySQL, it started addressing the most common issues. It was not quick acting, but we have seen real progress:

1. MySQL 5.7 has removed the anonymous accounts, which was the greatest threat to security. Because of those accounts, and the default privileges granted to them, users without any privileges could access the "test" database and do serious damage. Additionally, because of the way the privilege engine evaluates accounts, anonymous users could hijack legitimate users, by preventing them to work …

MySQL 8.0 will be GA soon (just my assumption: Oracle doesn't tell me anything about its release plans) and it's time to think about having a look at it.
If this is your first try of MySQL 8, get prepared for several impacting differences from previous versions.

In this article I won't tell you what you can do with MySQL 8: there is plenty of material about this, including in this very blog. I will instead concentrate on differences from previous versions that users need to know if they want to avoid surprises.

Data Directory

Let's start with an observation of the data directory.
After a standard installation, without any additional options, I see the following:

Files that I expected to see

auto.cnf
ib_buffer_pool
ib_logfile0
ib_logfile1
ibdata1
ibtmp1
(dir) mysql
(dir) …

Where the hell is it?

The MySQL shell is a potentially useful tool that has been intentionally made difficult to use properly.

It was introduced, with much fanfare, with the MySQL Document Store, as THE tool to bridge the SQL and no-SQL worlds. The release was less than satisfactory, though: MySQL 5.7.12 introduced a new feature (the X-protocol plugin) bundled with the server. The maturity of the plugin was unclear, as it popped out of the unknown into a GA release, without any public testing. It was allegedly GA quality, although the quantity of bug reports that were filed soon after the release proved otherwise. The maturity of the shell was known as "development preview", and so we had a supposedly GA feature that could only be used with an alpha …

How it happened

A few years ago I started thinking about refactoring MySQL-Sandbox. I got lots of ideas and a name for the project (dbdeployer) but went no further. The initial idea (this was 2013!) was to rewrite the project in Ruby: I had been using Ruby at work and it looked like a decent replacement for Perl. My main problem was the difficulty of installation in an uncontrolled environment. If you have control over your environment (it's your laptop or you are in charge of the server configuration via Puppet or similar) then the task is easy. But if you ever need to deploy somewhere with little or no notice, it becomes a problem: there are servers where Perl is not installed, and is common that the server also have a policy forbidding all scripting languages from being deployed. …