On Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, aka OCI, MySQL Database Service, aka MDS uses the snapshot technology to backup your data.

I will explain how it works in the multiple part blog series. In part 1, we will deal with taking snapshots as backup. In part 2, we will see how to restore data and for which usage.

Snapshots

The Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Block Volume service provides you with the capability to group together multiple volumes in a volume group.

This is exactly what MDS uses to store the data.

We can easily see this from some global variables:

+-----------------------------+--------------------------------+ | Variable_name | Value | +-----------------------------+--------------------------------+ | datadir | /db/data/ | | innodb_data_home_dir | /db/data/ | | innodb_log_group_home_dir …

Recently, Oracle added a Bastion Service to OCI. And you may also have noticed that the OCI Dashboard offers you the possibility to use a browser based terminal: Cloud Shell.

Today, we will see how we can use these two components to connect from the browser to a MDS DB System.

We need the MySQL DB System’s IP:

So in this example, the MDS Instance we want to connect to has 10.0.0.99 as IP.

Bastion Service

Now we will create a new Bastion Service that will allow us to create a SSH Tunnel to our MySQL DB System.

The Bastion Service’s dashboard is located in Identity & Security:

If this is the first time you create a Bastion, the list …

MySQL Shell is the popular tool to work with MySQL and it integrates perfectly everything for MySQL Database Service (MDS) in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).

For any logical dump and load of data and especially to dump data to MDS, MySQL Shell Utility is the recommended solution.

MySQL Shell Dump & Load is faster, is parallel and compatible with OCI (block storage, MDS grants, automatic primary key creations, ...)

This post is about compression.

By default, MySQL Shell Dump uses zstd compression.

Zstd, short for Zstandard, is a fast lossless compression algorithm, targeting real-time compression scenarios at zlib-level compression ratio.

It's possible to specify the compression algorithm to use for MySQL Shell Dump Utility with the compression option.

The …

With MySQL 8.0, the version of MySQL Database Service aka MDS, the default character set has changed from latin1 to ut8mb4. The default collation is utf8mb4_0900_ai_ci but what does that mean ? and why are the utf8mb4_0900_* the recommended ones ?

Collations like utf8mb4_unicode_520_ci and utf8mb4_0900_ai_ci are based on Unicode Collation Algorithm (UCA). The number in the collation defines the UCA version:

• UCA 9.0.0 (recommended)
  - example: utf8mb4_0900_ai_ci
• UCA 5.2.0 (not recommended, see problems below)
  - example: utf8mb4_unicode_520_ci

The …

If like me you are using MySQL Shell on many different systems and new installations, there are some commands I often use to benefit from my environment.

What I really want to enable is the history of course, a nicer prompt and sometimes the default mode I want to use.

This blog post is just a little reminder with those commands I usually repeat in all my systems:

mysql-js> shell.options.setPersist('history.autoSave', 1) mysql-js> shell.options.setPersist('history.maxSize', 5000)

The option above is when using MySQL Shell in JS mode which is the default. To play with options using the same command in every mode (JS, Python, SQL), you can use /option like:

\option --persist history.autoSave 1

Then I set the prompt to have something like this:

$ cp /usr/share/mysqlsh/prompt/prompt_256pl+aw.json …

Yesterday my friend and ex-colleague Sveta published a blog post on how to migrate ownership of stored routines, views and triggers in MySQL.

I usually agree a lot with her and even if I agree with what she wrote, there is one single point I would like to comment: use MySQL Shell !

In the blog post, Sveta recommends the use of mysqldump which I don’t. For any logical dump & load operations, I really recommend the use of MySQL Shell’s Dump & Load Utility ! It’s much faster, it has many nice options like hidden Primary Key creation, and is compatible with OCI.

And of course, MySQL Shell also provides …

Recently I blogged about how to easily deploy a LAMP application to MDS.

Using the Terraform module (OCI Resource Manager’s Stack) you also have the possibility to choose the PHP version to install:

But as you should already know, not all versions support the latest default authentication method in MySQL 8.0: caching_sha2_password [1], [2], [3].

Most of the PHP applications are using mysqli and …

As a continue of the previous announcement, please find below the list of shows where you can find MySQL Community and/or the MySQL team during the time of July - September 2021:

• July 2021:

  • MySQL meetup / Virtual, July 7, 2021

    • Carsten Thalheimer and Abdullah Zarour, the MySQL Principal Solution Engineers will be talking about Oracle Cloud - MySQL Database Service & HeatWave (for Real-time Analytics). 
    • Scheduled for 5:00 PM to 7:00 PM GMT+4. Please make sure you have zoom registration on …

We & local Oracle Cloud Community in Dubai are happy to announce upcoming MySQL OCI meetup scheduled for Wednesday, July 7th, 2021. Please find details below.

• Date: Wednesday, July 7th, 2021
• Time: 5:00 PM to 7:00 PM GMT+4
• Topic: MySQL Database Services (MDS), MySQL HeatWave for Real-time Analytics, demos
• Speaker: Carsten Thalheimer & Abdullah Zarour, the MySQL Principal Solution Engineers
• Form: virtual event (via zoom)
• More information & registration

Please find below the list of shows where you can find MySQL Community and/or the MySQL team at during April to June 2021:

• April 2021:

  • Data Love Conference/VIRTUAL, April 16, 2021

    • David Stokes, the MySQL Community Manager is going to talk about "Windowing Functions for Database Analytics", for the exact timing please check organizers' website.
  • MidwestPHP/VIRTUAL, April 22-23, 2021
    • David Stokes, the MySQL Community Manager is going to talk about "MySQL 8.0 New Features". The talk is scheduled for 1:50pm-2:30pm on April 22nd. 
    …