MySQL Support Blogs

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Maybe the biggest new feature in MySQL 8 is the new transaction data dictionary that improves the consistency of schema objects among other things. To further protect the data in the data dictionary, the data dictionary tables are hidden and their content only exposed through the Information Schema. (One exception is when you use the debug binary, then it is possible to get direct access to the data dictionary tables. This is not recommended at all on production systems!)

A side effect of the data dictionary tables being hidden is that those that have had a habit of manipulating the tables directly in MySQL 5.7 and earlier (I will not recommend doing that) will no longer be able to do so. Examples of manipulating the tables include …

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If you have an application that need to use multiple connections to the MySQL database for short periods of times, it can be a good to use a connection pool to avoid creating a new connection and going through the whole authentication process every time a connection is needed. For the Python Database API (PEP249), MySQL Connector/Python has had support for connection pools for a long time. With the release of MySQL 8.0.13, the new X DevAPI also has support for connection pools.

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MySQL Shell makes it easy to develop tools you can use for example to generate reports. In a previous blog, I showed how to use external modules in MySQL Shell. In this blog, I will take it one step further and use the curses Python module to create auto-refreshing reports. The first example will be kept very simple to show the idea, then a more realistic example will be shown where the top N files sorted by I/O will be returned.

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The other day, I was reading a blog by Magnus Hagander about tracking foreign keys throughout a schema in PostgreSQL. I thought it was a good idea, so I decided to look at how you can track foreign key in MySQL.

The way I decided to do it was to start out with a table, then find all tables referencing the table by a foreign key. From this basic (and simple as it will be shown) query, it is possible to create a chain of relations. The key table for the queries is information_schema.KEY_COLUMN_USAGE which has information about all the foreign key relationships. …

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Somebody on Freenode wanted this:

   Source            Result
+----+------+    +----+------+
| id | x    |    | id | c    |
+----+------+    +----+------+
|  1 |    1 |    |  1 |    2 |
|  2 |    1 |    |  2 |    2 |
|  3 | NULL |    |  3 | NULL |
|  4 | NULL | -> |  4 | NULL |
|  5 |    1 |    |  5 |    1 |
|  6 | NULL |    |  6 | NULL |
|  7 |    1 |    |  7 |    3 |
|  9 |    1 |    |  9 |    3 |
| 10 |    1 |    | 10 |    3 |
+----+------+    +----+------+

The result uses the NULL values in x as boundaries of windows, and counts the number of rows within each window. I don't know why anyone wants such a thing; it is not ours to reason why...

Anyway, the point is that you can use arbitrary expressions, even subqueries, to define your window partitions.

SELECT 
    id, 
    -- Count of rows in windows bound by NULL values in x
    IF(
      x IS NULL, 
      NULL, 
      COUNT(*) OVER (PARTITION BY (
        -- …

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A framework can be a great way to allow you to spend more time on the actual application or web site and less time on standard tasks. It can also greatly reduce the amount of custom code needed. Django is one of the best known web frameworks for Python, and the good news is that it works out of the box with MySQL Server 8 and MySQL Connector/Python 8. This blog will look at how to use Django with MySQL 8.

There actually is very little to get Django to work with MySQL 8. Just install it, configure Django to use MySQL Connector/Python as a backend, and that’s it. From the Django point of view, you just have to configure the database option in settings.py to use MySQL Connector/Python and your database settings, for example:

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First of all, thanks to everyone who attended my sessions at the recent Oracle OpenWorld and Code One in San Francisco. It was a great privilege to be allowed to make a number of presentations.

All of the workbooks and scripts from the hands-on labs (HOL) and the slides from the talks have been made available at OpenWorld’s and Code One’s session catalogues. You can download the files by using the OpenWorld catalog searching for my name or the session number (see below). Click on the download icon for each of the presentations you are interested in.

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I have already blogged a couple of times about the MySQL Shell prompt. In the first blog, I wrote about how in general to configure it, and in the second blog, I showed how to install the necessary fonts to use the prompt with the Awesome and Powerline fonts.

In this blog, I will show a new feature of MySQL Shell 8.0.13 which adds support to have a line break in the prompt and still get multi line statements align correctly. I will first discuss why you may want to use the new feature, then go through the new templates using this feature, and finally show my current favourite …

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MySQL 8.0.13 was released this week. There are several exciting changes including functional indexes and using general expressions as the default value for your columns. So, I will recommend you to get MySQL 8.0.13 installed and try out the new features. You can read about changed in the release notes section of the MySQL documentation and in Geir’s release blog.

However, what I would like to focus on in this blog is the external contributions that has been included in this release. There are five patches contributed by Facebook as well …

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Since MySQL 5.6, the digest feature of the MySQL Performance Schema has provided a convenient and effective way to obtain statistics of queries based on their normalized form. The feature works so well that it has almost completely (from my experience) replaced the connector extensions and proxy for collecting query statistics for the Query Analyzer (Quan) in MySQL Enterprise Monitor (MEM).

MySQL 8 adds further improvements to the digest feature in the Performance Schema including a sample query with statistics for each digest, percentile information, and a histogram summary. This blog will explore these new features.

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The traditional way to monitor replication in MySQL is the SHOW SLAVE STATUS command. However as it will be shown, it has its limitations and in MySQL 5.7 and 8.0 the MySQL developers have started to implement the information as Performance Schema tables. This has several advantages including better monitoring of the replication delay in MySQL 8.0. This blog discusses why SHOW SLAVE STATUS should be replaced with the Performance Schema tables.

The Setup

The replication setup that will be used for the examples in this blog can be seen in the following figure.

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There are various ways to shutdown MySQL. The traditional cross platform method is to use the shutdown command in the mysqladmin client. One drawback is that it requires shell access; another is that it cannot start MySQL again automatically. There are platform specific options that can perform a restart such as using systemctl on Linux or install MySQL as a service on Microsoft Windows. What I will look at here though is the built in support for stopping and restarting MySQL using SQL statements.

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Oracle MySQL Support will this year again take part in the Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco. Additionally, we will present at the developer focused Code One that is held at the same time. Oracle OpenWorld and Code One 2018 takes place at the Moscone Center and nearby hotels in San Francisco on Monday 22 October to Thursday 25 October.

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The MySQL Document Store became general available (GA) with MySQL 8. One of the nice features of the MySQL Document Store is the X DevAPI that allows you to query the data from a multitude of programming languages using the same API (but while retaining the conventions of the language). The programming languages with support for the X DevAPI includes JavaScript (Node.js), PHP, Java, DotNet, and C++.

I will be using MySQL Connector/Python 8.0.12 for the example in this blog. The example is executed on Microsoft Windows with Python 3.6 installed, but it has also been tested on Oracle Linux 7 with Python 2.7. I do assume that MySQL Connector/Python has been installed. If that is not the case, you can read how to do it in the …

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A month ago, I wrote a blog on how you can configure the MySQL Shell prompt to suit your needs.  One thing I did not go into details with are the prompt templates prompt_256pl.json and prompt_256pl+aw.json. Common for both of these templates is that they require custom fonts to work.

In the two file names, pl stands for the PowerLine fonts and aw for the Awesome font. These fonts add symbols that are useful to create rich prompts, not only for MySQL Shell, but also for Bash, zsh, vim, etc. The symbols include an angle separator, a lock (that in MySQL Shell is used to symbolize an TLS/SSL connection), and so on.

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One of the nice things about MySQL Connector/Python is that it is available in a pure Python implementation. This makes it very portable. Today I have been exploring the possibility to take advantage of that to make MySQL Connector/Python available on my iPad.

There are few Python interpreters available for iPad. The one I will be discussing today is Pythonista 3 which has support for both Python 2.7 and 3.6. One of the things that caught my interest is that it comes with libraries to work with iOS such as accessing the contact and photos as well as UI tools. This is a commercial program (AUD …

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It can be hard to recall all the details of how a program and API work. The usual way to handle that is to look at the manual or a book. Another – and in my opinion – nice way is to have built-in help, so you can find the information without changing between the program and browser. This blog discuss how to obtain help when you use MySQL Shell.

MySQL Shell is a client that allows you to execute queries and manage MySQL through SQL commands and JavaScript and Python code. It is a second …

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In MySQL NDB Cluster, the management node (ndb_mgmd) is a lightweight process that among other things handles the configuration of the cluster. Since it is lightweight. It can be tempting to install it with one of the other nodes. However, if you want a high-availability setup, you should never install it on the same host as a data node (ndbd or ndbmtd). If you do that, it can cause a total cluster outage where the cluster could otherwise have survived.

The first sign of trouble occurs when you start the management nodes. The following warning is printed to standard output:

2018-08-22 18:04:14 [MgmtSrvr] WARNING  -- at line 46: …

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Apress have been kind enough to invite me to write a blog in connection with my recently released book MySQL Connector/Python Revealed. I chose to write an introduction of MySQL Connector/Python including three examples illustrating the APIs and the difference between querying SQL tables and a JSON document store.

You can read the whole post at Apress’ blog.

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MySQL Shell is a great tool for working with MySQL. One of the features that make it stand out compared to the traditional mysql command-line client is the support for JavaScript and Python in addition to SQL statements. This allows you to write code you otherwise would have had to write outside the client. I showed a simple example of this in my post about the instant ALTER TABLE feature in MySQL 8.0.12 where a Python loop was used to populate a table with 1 million rows This blog will look further into the use of Python and more specifically external modules.

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