Please join Percona’s Consultant David Ducos on Thursday, December 29, 2016 at 10 am PST/ 1:00 pm EST (UTC-8) as he presents JSON in MySQL 5.7.

Since it was implemented in MySQL 5.7, we can use JSON as a data type. In this webinar, we will review some of the useful functions that have been added to work with JSON.

We will examine and analyze how JSON works internally, and take into account some of the costs related to employing this new technology. 

At the end of the webinar, you will know the answers to the following questions: 

• What is JSON?
• Why don’t we keep using VARCHAR?
• How does it work? 
• What are the costs?
• What limitations should we take …

Related resources  The choice of MySQL storage engine and its impact on backup procedures  Customizing your database backups with ClusterControl  Become a ClusterControl DBA - Safeguarding your data  Webinar: Become a MySQL DBA - Backups  Become a MySQL DBA blog series - Backup and Restore

All backup methods have their pros and cons. They …

Today in our series of articles related to MySQL Group Replication’s limitations, let’s have a quick look at Savepoints.

The manual is clear about this: Transaction savepoints are not supported.

The first thing to check then is if the application that will use our MySQL Group Replication Cluster is currently using savepoints.

We have two ways to find this, the first is using STATUS variables:

mysql> show global status like '%save%';
+----------------------------+-------+
| Variable_name              | Value |
+----------------------------+-------+
| Com_release_savepoint      | 2     |
| Com_rollback_to_savepoint  | 0     |
| Com_savepoint              | 4     |
| Handler_savepoint          | 0     |
| Handler_savepoint_rollback | 0     |
+----------------------------+-------+

MySQL 5.6 introduced semi-join transformation for IN-subqueries. This opened up for several new ways to execute such subqueries; one was no longer tied to executing the subquery once for every row of the outer query. This dramatically improved the performance of many such queries. However, semi-join transformation does not apply to all types of queries. For example, if the subquery has a GROUP BY clause, semi-join does not apply. (For a full list of which types of queries can not use semi-join, see the Reference Manual.)

Fortunately, MySQL 5.6 also introduced subquery materialization that can be used when semi-join does not apply; as …

Welcome to this week’s Planets9s, covering all the latest resources and technologies we create around automation and management of open source database infrastructures.

You are a DBA working hard to keep all the databases running so your staff can enter key data.  Okay, if truth be known, maybe at the same time you are creating a MySQL program that fires off various lights with music for numerous holiday celebrations (Christmas, Day of the Return of the Wandering Goddess, Festivus, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Winter Solstice, Saturnalia, and Yule).

Suddenly, you get a dreaded phone from a harried user, ‘my query is hanging’. Time for you to drop everything else. Is the database down? Is there a networking problem? A bad index?

Fortunately, you have the MySQL Enterprise Monitor (MEM) to help you to solve the problem quickly. You notice on the MEM dashboard that there is a spike in the number of connections and you right-click, changing color to blue over the spike:

After right-clicking on the little disk by the query spike, you advance to the Query Analyzer panel where you see individual …

Take Percona’s blog poll on what programming languages you’re using for backend development.

While customers and users focus and interact with applications and websites, these are really just the tip of the iceberg for the whole end-to-end system that allows applications to run. The backend is what makes a website or application work. The backend has three parts to it: server, application, and database. A backend operation can be a web application communicating with the server to make a change in a database stored on a server. Technologies like PHP, Ruby, Python, and others are the ones backend programmers use to make this communication work smoothly, allowing the customer to purchase his or her ticket with ease.

Backend programmers might not get a lot of credit, but they are the ones that design, …

This blog shows the results from Percona’s poll on what database technologies our readers use in their environment.

We design different databases for different scenarios. Using one database technology for every situation doesn’t make sense, and can lead to non-optimal solutions for common issues. Big data and IoT applications, high availability, secure backups, security, cloud vs. on-premises deployment: each have a set of requirements that might need a special technology. Relational, document-based, key-value, graphical, column family – there are many options for many problems. More and more, database environments combine more than one solution to address the various needs of an enterprise or application (known as polyglot persistence).

The following are the results of our poll on database …

On Databases, Temporal Datatypes and Trains anderskarlsson1 Wed, 12/21/2016 - 13:18

Introduction

The data type aspect of databases is a key feature as is it when it comes to programming languages. I would guess that all programming languages, with the possible exception of assembly, provides a set of predefined “built in” datatypes. Some programming languages are limited in this respect, like Forth, where others have a larger set of types. A data type determines what data can be stored, what operations are allowed and semantics.

One family of data types that is present in more or less all relational databases  (I don’t say all here as I know someone will tell me about an arcane relational database systems developed in Burundi where this is not true) is the temporal types, i.e. datatypes that hold a time value. This in difference to most programming languages where the native datatypes are numeric and …