dbdeployer went into release candidate status a few weeks ago. Since then, I added no new features, but a lot of tests. The test suite now runs 3,000+ tests on MacOS and a bit more on Linux, for a grand total of 6,000+ tests that need to run at least twice: once with concurrency enabled and once without. I know that testing can't prove the absence of bugs, but I am satisfied with the results, since all this grinding has allowed me to find several bugs and fix them.

In this framework, I felt that dbdeployer could exit candidate status and get to version 1.0. This happened on March 26th. An immediate side effect of this change is that from this point on, dbdeployer must adhere to the semantic versioning principles:

A version number is made of Major, Minor, and Revision. When changes are applied, the following happens:

…

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;
…

In this blog post, we’ll look at how to turn on binlog encryption in Percona Server for MySQL.

Why do I need this?

As you probably know, Percona Server for MySQL’s binlog contains sensitive information. Replication uses the binlog to copy events between servers. They contain all the information from one server so that it can be applied on another. In other words, if somebody has access to a binlog, it means they have access to all the data in the server. Moreover, said person (or, “Hacker”) could create a clone copy of our server by just making a replica of it. In the end, they have access to our binlog. This shows how important protecting a binlog really is – leakage of binlogs not only make a particular table/tablespace or a group of tables accessible to a hacker, but literally the whole server …

As of version 0.2.1, dbdeployer allows users to customize composite sandboxes more than ever. This is done by manipulating the default settings, which are used to deploy the sandbox templates.

In order to appreciate the customization capabilities, let's start with a vanilla deployment, and then we have a look at the possible changes.

$ dbdeployer deploy replication 8.0.4
Installing and starting master
Database installed in $HOME/sandboxes/rsandbox_8_0_4/master
. sandbox server started
Installing and starting slave 1
Database installed in …

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) …

Please join Percona’s Principal Support Engineer, Sveta Smirnova, as she presents Performance Schema for MySQL Troubleshooting on Thursday, March 1, 2018, at 10:00 am PST (UTC-8) / 1:00 pm EST (UTC-5).

Register Now

Performance Schema, first introduced in version 5.5, is a really powerful tool. It is actively under development, and each new version provides even more instruments for database administrators.

Performance Schema is complicated. It is also not free: it can slow down performance if you enable certain …

In this blog post, I’ll look at how you can analyze raw MySQL query logs with ClickHouse.

For typical query performance analyses, we have an excellent tool in Percona Monitoring and Management. You may want to go deeper, though. You might be longing for the ability to query raw MySQL “slow” query logs with SQL.

There are a number of tools to load the MySQL slow query logs to a variety of data stores. For example, you can find posts showing how to do it with LogStash. While very flexible, these solutions always look too complicated and limited in functionality to me.   

By far the best solution to parse and load MySQL slow query logs (among multiple log types supported) is Charity …

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 …