Chapter 30 MySQL Enterprise Edition

MySQL Enterprise Monitor is an enterprise monitoring system for MySQL that keeps an eye on your MySQL servers, notifies you of potential issues and problems, and advises you how to fix the issues. MySQL Enterprise Monitor can monitor all kinds of configurations, from a single MySQL server that is important to your business, all the way up to a huge farm of MySQL servers powering a busy website.

The following discussion briefly summarizes the basic components that make up the MySQL Enterprise Monitor product. For more information, see the MySQL Enterprise Monitor manual, available at https://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql-monitor/en/.

MySQL Enterprise Monitor components can be installed in various configurations depending on your database and network topology, to give you the best combination of reliable and responsive monitoring data, with minimal overhead on the database server machines. A typical MySQL Enterprise Monitor installation consists of:

MySQL Enterprise Monitor is designed to monitor one or more MySQL servers. The monitoring information is collected by using an agent, MySQL Enterprise Monitor Agent. The agent communicates with the hosts and MySQL servers that it monitors, collecting variables, status and health information, and sending this information to the MySQL Enterprise Service Manager.

The information collected by the agent about each MySQL server and host you are monitoring is sent to the MySQL Enterprise Service Manager. This server collates all of the information from the agents. As it collates the information sent by the agents, the MySQL Enterprise Service Manager continually tests the collected data, comparing the status of the server to reasonable values. When thresholds are reached, the server can trigger an event (including an alarm and notification) to highlight a potential issue, such as low memory, high CPU usage, or more complex conditions such insufficient buffer sizes and status information. We call each test, with its associated threshold value, a rule.

These rules, and the alarms and notifications, are each known as a MySQL Enterprise Advisors. Advisors form a critical part of the MySQL Enterprise Service Manager, as they provide warning information and troubleshooting advice about potential problems.

The MySQL Enterprise Service Manager includes a web server, and you interact with it through any web browser. This interface, the MySQL Enterprise Monitor User Interface, displays all of the information collected by the agents, and lets you view all of your servers and their current status as a group or individually. You control and configure all aspects of the service using the MySQL Enterprise Monitor User Interface.

The information supplied by the MySQL Enterprise Monitor Agent processes also includes statistical and query information, which you can view in the form of graphs. For example, you can view aspects such as server load, query numbers, or index usage information as a graph over time. The graph lets you pinpoint problems or potential issues on your server, and can help diagnose the impact from database or external problems (such as external system or network failure) by examining the data from a specific time interval.

The MySQL Enterprise Monitor Agent can also be configured to collect detailed information about the queries executed on your server, including the row counts and performance times for executing each query. You can correlate the detailed query data with the graphical information to identify which queries were executing when you experienced a particularly high load, index or other issue. The query data is supported by a system called Query Analyzer, and the data can be presented in different ways depending on your needs.

MySQL Enterprise Backup performs hot backup operations for MySQL databases. The product is architected for efficient and reliable backups of tables created by the InnoDB storage engine. For completeness, it can also back up tables from MyISAM and other storage engines.

The following discussion briefly summarizes MySQL Enterprise Backup. For more information, see the MySQL Enterprise Backup manual, available at https://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql-enterprise-backup/en/.

Hot backups are performed while the database is running and applications are reading and writing to it. This type of backup does not block normal database operations, and it captures even changes that occur while the backup is happening. For these reasons, hot backups are desirable when your database “grows up” -- when the data is large enough that the backup takes significant time, and when your data is important enough to your business that you must capture every last change, without taking your application, website, or web service offline.

MySQL Enterprise Backup does a hot backup of all tables that use the InnoDB storage engine. For tables using MyISAM or other non-InnoDB storage engines, it does a “warm” backup, where the database continues to run, but those tables cannot be modified while being backed up. For efficient backup operations, you can designate InnoDB as the default storage engine for new tables, or convert existing tables to use the InnoDB storage engine.

MySQL Enterprise Edition provides plugins that implement security features using external services:

For other related Enterprise security features, see Section 30.4, “MySQL Enterprise Encryption Overview”.

MySQL Enterprise Edition includes a set of encryption functions based on the OpenSSL library that expose OpenSSL capabilities at the SQL level. These functions enable Enterprise applications to perform the following operations:

For more information, see Section 6.6, “MySQL Enterprise Encryption”.

For other related Enterprise security features, see Section 30.3, “MySQL Enterprise Security Overview”.

MySQL Enterprise Edition includes MySQL Enterprise Audit, implemented using a server plugin. MySQL Enterprise Audit uses the open MySQL Audit API to enable standard, policy-based monitoring and logging of connection and query activity executed on specific MySQL servers. Designed to meet the Oracle audit specification, MySQL Enterprise Audit provides an out of box, easy to use auditing and compliance solution for applications that are governed by both internal and external regulatory guidelines.

When installed, the audit plugin enables MySQL Server to produce a log file containing an audit record of server activity. The log contents include when clients connect and disconnect, and what actions they perform while connected, such as which databases and tables they access.

For more information, see Section 6.4.5, “MySQL Enterprise Audit”.

MySQL Enterprise Edition includes MySQL Enterprise Firewall, an application-level firewall that enables database administrators to permit or deny SQL statement execution based on matching against allowlists of accepted statement patterns. This helps harden MySQL Server against attacks such as SQL injection or attempts to exploit applications by using them outside of their legitimate query workload characteristics.

Each MySQL account registered with the firewall has its own statement allowlist, enabling protection to be tailored per account. For a given account, the firewall can operate in recording or protecting mode, for training in the accepted statement patterns or protection against unacceptable statements.

For more information, see Section 6.4.7, “MySQL Enterprise Firewall”.

MySQL Enterprise Edition includes MySQL Enterprise Thread Pool, implemented using a server plugin. The default thread-handling model in MySQL Server executes statements using one thread per client connection. As more clients connect to the server and execute statements, overall performance degrades. In MySQL Enterprise Edition, a thread pool plugin provides an alternative thread-handling model designed to reduce overhead and improve performance. The plugin implements a thread pool that increases server performance by efficiently managing statement execution threads for large numbers of client connections.

For more information, see Section 5.6.3, “MySQL Enterprise Thread Pool”.

MySQL Enterprise Edition 5.7 and higher includes MySQL Enterprise Data Masking and De-Identification, implemented as a plugin library containing a plugin and a set of user-defined functions. Data masking hides sensitive information by replacing real values with substitutes. MySQL Enterprise Data Masking and De-Identification functions enable masking existing data using several methods such as obfuscation (removing identifying characteristics), generation of formatted random data, and data replacement or substitution.

For more information, see Section 6.5, “MySQL Enterprise Data Masking and De-Identification”.