(Ceri Williams) The news that the latest MySQL 8.0.4 RC (release candidate) is available is indeed exciting. Unfortunately for users of the auth_socket plugin, dangers lie in wait!

(Luis Soares) MySQL 8 second release candidate is out (MySQL 8.0.4). Besides fixes to replication issues we have also delivered a couple of enhancements in this release. Let me quickly summarize them.

(Frederic Descamps) Changing configuration settings in MySQL wasn’t always easy. Of course it’s possible to change things (hopefully), but keeping track of everything is not always obvious. This is where configuration management systems like puppet, chef, ansible, … excels in making our life easier.

(Federico) USE/FORCE/IGNORE INDEX syntax, or index hints, are nice shortcuts to make sure that MySQL will (or will not) use a certain index. But it comes with some drawbacks:

(Shree Nair) Although it feels like it was only yesterday that Oracle released version 5.7 of their acclaimed MySQL Community Server, version 8 is already available as a development milestone release (DMR).

(René Cannaò) The Percona toolkit provides a very useful script for more accurate replication lag monitoring called pt-heartbeat. The pt-heartbeat script provides replication lag metrics based on actual data that has been replicated and is more accurate than the Seconds_Behind_Master metrics gathere

(Vadim Tkachenko and Alexey Stroganov) In this blog post, we’ll look at does the Meltdown fix affect performance for MySQL on bare metal servers.

(Kedar Vaijanapurkar) I’m going to narrate you a story that happened around a crashing MyQL, Corrupted InnoDB table and finally the recovery by table restore. We will see how our database administrator detected the issue and what he did to resolve it.

(Forrest Lymburner) This video, based on last weeks blog “Ten Tips to Achieve MySQL and MariaDB Security”, walks you through ten different items to keep in mind when deploying a MySQL or MariaDB database to production.

(Mark Callaghan) This is my second performance report for the Meltdown patch using in-memory sysbench and a small server. In this test I used a core i5 NUC with the 4.13 and 4.8 kernels. In the previous test I used a core i3 NUC with the 4.4 kernel.