dasini.net – Diary of a MySQL expert

Some regulations required that the password is renewed in a timely and appropriate manner (e.g. every 90 days). In this article, 2nd of the MySQL 5.7 Security series, we will see how to to establish a policy for password expiration with MySQL 5.7 Password Management.

In this article, 1st of a MySQL 5.7 Security series, we will see how to enforce Strong Passwords with Password Validation Plugin when using MySQL 5.7.

Authentication with ID and password is a very simple and common (because it’s simple) way to secure the access to a resource, however the password can be the weak point of this system. In order to increase the security level, you can required that your user passwords meet certain minimal security requirements, using the MySQL Password validation plugin!

There are 3 pillars for a database architecture: Monitoring, Backup / Restore process, High Availability
This blog post is about database High Availability; more precisely about one of the best combo of the moment :
MySQL 5.7 Group Replication : the only native HA solution for MySQL, it’s a Single/Multi-master update everywhere replication plugin for MySQL with built-in automatic distributed recovery, conflict detection and group membership.
ProxySQL 1.4 : probably the best proxy for MySQL.

When starting a new project, it is generally recommended to go on the most recent version of MySQL, to take advantage of the latest features but also (mainly?) to be sure to be up to date with the security patches.

This blog post centralizes the various URLs where to download the world’s most popular open source database.

I regularly meet with MySQL customers and I’m still a little surprised to see critical applications running on “not really” recent versions (to put it mildly) 🙂

The good news is that obviously old versions of MySQL are sufficiently stable and powerful to run the modern business. However, even if I understand that it is sometimes appropriate to freeze all layers of an architecture, it is often a shame not to take advantage of the latest improvements from a performance, stability, security point of view and obviously for the new features that the latest GA provides :

Sometime DBAs have to deal with problematic queries and cannot tackle the problem at the source (problematic queries from ORMs, third party apps,… or source unknown…).
MySQL 5.7 provides a pre and post parse query rewrite APIs where users can write their own plug-ins.
With the post-parse query plugin, you can rewrite problematic queries without the need to make application changes, add hints, modify join order…

MySQL 5.7 is GA and has over than 150 new features. One of them is a Native JSON Data Type and JSON Functions: “Allows for efficient and flexible storage, search and manipulation of schema-less data. Enhancements include a new internal binary format, support for easy integration within SQL, and index management on the JSON Documents using generated columns”.

Packt Publishing started a Free Learning Campaign by providing a free ebook everyday till 6th March 2015.

One of my colleague asked me : « Is an ALTER TABLE with many specifications is faster than 1 ALTER TABLE by specification ? »

The answers seems quite intuitive, anyway figures are better than a long speech…

Context :

MySQL Community Server 5.5.22

InnoDB table with 8 539 238 rows.

17 columns with INT, CHAR, VARCHAR, TEXT, DATETIME, … fields