#WDILTW – Debugging failed http requests thru the web of redirects

There are reports that your website is down. You pull up the login page without incident. What’s next? Monitoring is critical. How detailed is this? How frequently are you sampling? The resolution to any issue is only as good as the response to a paged alert.

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#WDILTW – AWS RDS Proxy

This week I was evaluating AWS RDS Proxy . If you are familiar with the Relational Database Service (RDS) and use MySQL or Postgres, this is an additional option to consider.

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TDD for Infrastructure

Test Driven Development (TDD) is an important principle for producing quality software. This is not a new concept. The Extreme Programming (XP) agile methodology (1999) outlined the concept before the acronym became more widely accepted as “Another requirement is testability.

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Enforcing a least privileged security model can be hard

In a greenfield environment you generally have the luxury to right any wrongs of any past tech debt. It can be more difficult to apply this to an existing environment? For example, my setup is configured to just work with the AWS CLI and various litmus tests to validate that.

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Defensive Data Techniques

As a data architect I always ensure that for any database schema change there a fully recoverable execution path. I have generally advised to create a patch/revert process for every change.

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MySQL Data Security Risk Assessment presentation

Securing your data is only as good as your weakest link. A clear-text password in a file or history file, shared privileges between test and production or open sudo access when you can connect as an unprivileged user all are security flaws.

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Identifying MySQL SSL communication using ngrep

Prior to MySQL 5.7 client communications with a MySQL instance were unencrypted by default. This plaintext capability allowed for various tools including pt-query-digest to analyze TCP/IP traffic. Starting with MySQL 5.

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Testing MySQL/MariaDB/Percona versions with Docker

Giuseppe Maxia has provided some great MySQL docker images . Percona and MariaDB also provide version via Docker Hub. In an attempt to have a consistent means of launching these different images I created the following convenience functions.

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Getting a clearer picture of http response time breakdown via CLI

I came across this handy python script https://github.com/reorx/httpstat that provides a http response breakdown in text. This saves you having to open up a browser and look at a visual network response waterfall.

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OTN appreciation day: The Performance Schema of MySQL 5.6+

To focus on just one point for OTN appreciation day on October 11 2016 and to the benefit of all users of MySQL is to consider the extremely convenient and rich value of information available in the MySQL Performance Schema to understand what SQL queries are running in a MySQL instance now.

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MySQL Group Replication OOW Tutorial

Download Slides The second MySQL tutorial session at Oracle Open World was “MySQL Group Replication in a Nutshell” by MySQL Community Manager Frederic Descamps. This is succinctly described as: “Multi-master update anywhere replication for MySQL with built-in conflict detection and resolution, automatic distributed recovery, and group membership.

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Presentations at Percona Live Amsterdam 2016

I was fortunate enough to give four presentations at the Percona Live 2016 event in Amsterdam. The slides for these are now available. Improving MySQL Performance with Better Indexes – Download slides – Overview MySQL Replication Smackdown – Download Slides – Overview Securing your MySQL/MariaDB data – A joint presentation with Colin Charles – Download Slides – Overview “A surprising excursion through the astonishing world of math” – Lightning Talk – Download Slides

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New UUID functions in MySQL 8.0.0

MySQL 8.0.0 introduces three new miscellaneous UUID functions of IS_UUID(), UUID_TO_BIN() and BIN_TO_UUID() joining the UUID() (in 5.0) and UUID_SHORT() (in 5.1) functions. See 8.0.0 Release Notes . Thanks to the great work and hosting by Marcus Popp anybody can test out the SQL syntax of MySQL 8.

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Introducing the MySQL Cloud Service

The MySQL keynote at Oracle Open World 2016 announced the immediate availability of the MySQL Cloud Service, part of the larger Oracle Cloud offering. You can evaluate this now with a trial copy at cloud.

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