The MySQL Enterprise Audit plug-in is part of the MySQL Enterprise Edition (available through a paid license). Basically, Enterprise Audit tracks everything that is happening on your MySQL server, and can be used to protect/detect the misuse of information, and to meet popular compliance regulations including HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley, and the PCI Data Security Standard.

MySQL Enterprise Audit uses the open MySQL Audit API to enable standard, policy-based monitoring and logging of connection and query activity executed on specific MySQL servers. Designed to meet the …

The website or mobile app is the storefront for participating in the modern digital era. It’s your portal for inviting users to come and survey your products and services. Much attention focuses on front-end development; this is where the HMTL5, CSS, and JavaScript are coded to develop the landing page that everyone sees when they visit your site.

But the real magic happens on the backend. This is the ecosystem that really powers your website. One writer has articulated this point very nicely as follows:

The technology and programming that “power” a site—what your end user doesn’t see but what makes the site run—is called the back end. Consisting of the server, the database, and the server-side applications, it’s the behind-the-scenes functionality—the brain of a site. …

OK, Y’all.  If you have been a DBA long enough you have run into situations where you’ve had to import DDL from another database instance and forgotten to remove AUTO_INCREMENT on a table definition.  Sometimes this means your auto_increment is way up in the millions and you have 10 rows in the table.  People worried about ID depletion on an integer column will do a “facepalm”.

Making matters worse, having perhaps done this on more than one table, sometimes it’s a real pain to detect and fix the issue of auto_increments being much higher than you want them to be across a big number of tables.  Sometimes the pain is so great that you might want to simply repeat your data importation.

This quick and dirty “southern fried” script will help you report and rectify that.  It detects …

Introduction

Recently I have been involved in an effort to convert MySQL databases from a utf8 character set to utf8mb4. As a part of this effort, my team evaluated which collations would be best for facilitating a broad range of multi-lingual support.

There have been many recent posts in the MySQL community about better unicode collation support in MySQL 8 such as from the MySQL Server Team’s blog at Oracle, who have also done a good job of showing us how newer collations based on UTF8 9.0.0 will properly group and sort characters according to their case and inheritance. As the title of the latter post suggests, the “devil is” indeed “in the details”.

There is also the matter of the …

Most users of MySQL utilize the mysqldump utility to backup their database. While mysqldump is handy and easy-to-use (and free), if you have data which is important to your business, then you should take a look at the MySQL Enterprise Edition – and use MySQL Enterprise Backup instead. The MySQL Enterprise Backup allows you to backup your database without the table locking you get with mysqldump. And, it is extremely fast – especially when you have to restore your database. Here is a sample speed comparison between MySQL Enterprise Backup and …

So today we look at an aspect of capacity management or planning and how it relates to MySQL and its Logging.  For this blog I’m primarily going to look at MySQL’s binary logs. They have a tendency to grow, and will continue to if not held in check.  Happily, they tend to be easy to… Read More »

In this blog post, I’d like to take a look at a few different things such as MySQL Group Replication, multi-instance MySQL setups on systemd and shell scripting the whole mess to make it easy to build, and easy to rebuild.  To be honest, it took a little help from Shinguz’s blog to get the… Read More »

Ever wanted to just look at QPS in real time while logged into your server?

Well here’s a little command line hackery to do it quick and dirty.

[user@yourserver ~] $ LASTVAL=0; while true; do CURVAL=`mysql --batch -N -e "show status like 'Quer%';" | awk '{print $2}'`; QPS=`expr $CURVAL - $LASTVAL`; if [ $LASTVAL -ne 0 ]; then echo "$CURVAL $QPS"; fi; LASTVAL=$CURVAL; sleep 1; done

The output looks like this:

65549603430 2439
65549605421 1991
65549606912 1491
65549611219 4307
65549614186 2967
65549618048 3862
65549620853 2805

The first column is just the Query counter value. The second column is the QPS.

This script requires a .my.cnf to exist in your home directory (or that you do something nastily insecure and supply -u user -ppassword to the mysql command in the example above).

This only works if you’re using innodb_file_per_table.

Purpose: import this csv quickly into google sheets (or other spreadsheet) and compare MySQL’s internal data size to the container size on disk to determine tables needing to be optimized (or “null altered”) to reclaim disk space and maybe increase performance due to defragmentation. Rule of thumb is probably something like >=10% difference may warrant action.

I wrote this loop as a one-liner dynamically / ad-hoc on the command line a couple weeks ago but made it into a configurable, yet quick-and-dirty shell script, below.

Add -u and -p arguments to MySQL CLI command if you need to, or just place a .my.cnf in your home directory and use the script as-is.

#!/bin/bash

DATADIR="/path/to/datadir" # ex: /var/lib/mysql
SCHEMANAME="yourschema"

for x in `mysql --batch -n -e "select concat(concat(table_name,'.ibd'),',',(data_length + index_length)) as …

This blog is a 2nd part of a multi-part series on areas of  failover for MySQL.  The first installment looked at design considerations, giving us a “thinking” perspective on what we might want to adopt.  Later I will take a look at more of a business and operational way of thinking through these details.  In… Read More »