(Jervin Real) In many types of database workloads, using a multi-threaded slave from 5.6+ helps improve replication performance. I’ve had a number of users enable this feature, but have not seen anyone ask how each thread is performing.

(Valeriy Kravchuk) I’ve got several useful habits over the years of work in MySQL Support. One of them is to start working on every problem with search for known MySQL bugs related to the problem at hand.

(Sveta Smirnova) In the previous post for this ongoing “EXPLAIN FORMAT=JSON is Cool!” series, we discussed covered indexes and how the used_columns array can help to choose them wisely.

(Todd Farmer) Knowing which privileges a given account has is easy – just issue SHOW GRANTS FOR user@host. But what about when you need visibility into privileges from the other direction – which accounts can access specific data?

(Alok Pathak) We work on data recoveries quite often. In many cases, we recover table structures from the .frm files because there was no backup available. There is already a great blog post by my colleague Miguel Ángel Nieto about how we can recover structures from .frm files using MySQL utilities.

(Guilhem Bichot) If you have used SQL a bit, you are certainly familiar with so-called set functions or aggregate functions COUNT, SUM, AVG, described in the manual. For example, let’s say that I am the owner of a shop and I keep track of daily sales in this table:

(Sveta Smirnova) In the “MySQL Query tuning 101” video, Alexander Rubin provides an excellent example of when to use a covered index.

(Simon Mudd) MySQL 5.7 GA was released a couple of months ago now with 5.7.9 and 5.7.10 has been published a few days ago. So far initial testing of these versions looks pretty good and both versions have proved to be stable.

(Todd Farmer) MySQL Connector/Java 5.1.38 was released earlier this week, and it includes a notable improvement related to secure connections. Here’s how the change log describes it:

(Alexander Falk) Google recently announced their next generation of managed MySQL offerings on Cloud SQL, so we wanted to take it for a spin and create a cloud-based SQL database that we could then utilize as the back-end for mobile apps, or even for advanced data analytics from our desktop.