MySQL 8.0 has been released as stable (GA) earlier this month. For db4free.net this means it’s time to make MySQL 8.0 the default version and to deprecate the MySQL 5.7 server instance.

The new MySQL 8.0 server is running on the default port 3306. All new registrations will have the database created on this server. It is fresh and empty and will start from scratch.

The previous MySQL 5.7 server will remain available on port 3308. All users who have data there which they want to keep should migrate it to the new MySQL 8.0 server. This will require you to sign up again.

The previous MySQL 8.0 server will remain on port 3307. Both the old MySQL 5.7 and the old MySQL 8.0 server on port 3307 will be available until June 15, 2018. Data which isn’t migrated to the new server instance by then will be lost.

The new MySQL 8.0 server instance will come …

What does Anton Ego – a fictional restaurant critic from the Pixar movie Ratatouille – have to do with MySQL 8.0 GA?

When it comes to being a software critic, a lot.

In many ways, the work of a software critic is easy. We risk very little and thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to read and write.

But what about those who give their many hours of code development, and those who have tested such code before release? How about the many people behind the scenes who brought together packaging, documentation, multiple hours of design, marketing, online resources and more?

And all of that, I might add, is open source! Free for the world to take, copy, adapt and even incorporate in full or in part into their own open development.

It is in exactly that area that the …

MySQL 8.0 became Generally Available (GA) on April 19th, a great moment for us working on MySQL at Oracle. It is now a “fully grown adult” packed with new features, and improvements to existing features, as described here.

This blog post focuses on the impact of replication performance improvements that went into MySQL 8.0.…

Watch the replay of Part 2 of our database high availability webinar special!

Thanks to to everyone who participated in this week’s webinar on how to measure database availability. The replay and slides are now available to view online.

It is notoriously hard to measure and report on, although it is an important KPI in any SLA between you and your customer. With that in mind, we will discuss the different factors that affect database availability and see how you can measure your database availability in a realistic way.

It is common enough to define availability in terms of 9s (e.g. 99.9% or 99.999%) - especially here at Severalnines - although there are often different opinions as to what these numbers …

We are pleased to announce that MySQL Enterprise Monitor 4.0.4 is now available for download on the My Oracle Support (MOS) web site. This is a maintenance release that includes a few new features and fixes a number of bugs. You can find more information on the contents of this release in the change log.

You will find binaries for the new release on My Oracle Support. Choose the "Patches & Updates" tab, and then choose the "Product or Family (Advanced Search)" side tab in the "Patch Search" portlet.

Important: MySQL Enterprise Monitor (MEM) 8.0 offers many significant improvements over MEM 3.3, 3.4, and 4.0 and we highly recommend that you consider upgrading. More information on MEM 8.0 is available here:

• …

We are pleased to announce that MySQL Enterprise Monitor 3.4.7 is now available for download on the My Oracle Support (MOS) web site. This is a maintenance release that includes a few new features and fixes a number of bugs. You can find more information on the contents of this release in the change log.

You will find binaries for the new release on My Oracle Support. Choose the "Patches & Updates" tab, and then choose the "Product or Family (Advanced Search)" side tab in the "Patch Search" portlet.

Important: MySQL Enterprise Monitor (MEM) 8.0 offers many significant improvements over MEM 3.3, 3.4, and 4.0 and we highly recommend that you consider upgrading. More information on MEM 8.0 is available here:

• …

We are pleased to announce that MySQL Enterprise Monitor 3.3.9 is now available for download on the My Oracle Support (MOS) web site. This is a maintenance release that includes a few new features and fixes a number of bugs. You can find more information on the contents of this release in the change log.

You will find binaries for the new release on My Oracle Support. Choose the "Patches & Updates" tab, and then choose the "Product or Family (Advanced Search)" side tab in the "Patch Search" portlet.

Important: MySQL Enterprise Monitor (MEM) 8.0 offers many significant improvements over MEM 3.3, 3.4, and 4.0 and we highly recommend that you consider upgrading. More information on MEM 8.0 is available here:

• …

The requirements for managing and running a database in a modern enterprise have evolved over the past ten years. Those in charge of running enterprise databases have seen their focus shift from ensuring access and availability, to architecture, design and scalability responsibilities. Web-first companies pioneered the change by charging site reliability engineers (SRE’s) or multi-faceted DBAs with the task of ensuring that the company’s main revenue engine not only stayed up, but could scale to wherever the business needed to go. This is a far cry from the classic enterprise DBA’s top responsibilities: keep it up, keep it backed up, and react to issues as they present themselves.

Today, enterprises look for new revenue models to keep up with a shifting technology paradigm driven by the cloud. The requirements and needs for managing their database environments are changing along with this shift. In the SaaS world, application outages …

A number of new JSON functions have been added to MySQL 8.0. Since we appreciate that not everyone will be ready to upgrade to MySQL 8.0 the minute it is released, we have backported many of the new functions to MySQL 5.7 so that they are available starting with version 5.7.22.…

You have to be careful what you wish for. The signal:noise ratio of finding out which indexes are “unused” is low. This isn’t obvious at first glance, but upon deeper inspection, there’s often not much to be gained, and it can even harm you. Let’s look at why.

How to Find Unused Indexes

The typical way to figure out which indexes aren’t used is to examine index-usage counters over a period of time. The database itself can provide these statistics: PostgreSQL has built-in views that can expose them, and in MySQL there’s similar views as well as community patches that originally came from Google. There’s a way to get the stats in MongoDB too.

The Advice

What advice do people want about unused indexes? It typically boils down to:

• Tell me indexes that don’t seem to have any activity according to the statistics.
• Prioritize these indexes by the size or …