Recent content in Ronald Bradford - Data Architect, MySQL Expert, Author & Speaker on Enterprise Data Architect | Principal Data Strategist | MySQL Subject Matter Expert | Author | Speaker
Let’s say you’re building a reference table from source data, e.g. a silver medallion table from a primary source. In this example I am using a file of random locations on the globe extracted from OpenStreetMap (OSM) as my primary source.
Clean data is one of those terms everyone uses and few define precisely. Row counts match? No nulls in key columns? Values within expected ranges? All useful checks — and all insufficient once you move from a table view to a visualization view.
Synthetic benchmarks have their place, but I have always preferred working with real data. Not client production data — that stays private — but publicly available datasets that reflect the messy shapes, skewed distributions, and indexing challenges you encounter in the wild.
I recently had the pleasure of presenting Planning your upgrade to MySQL 9.7 at COSCUP 2026 in Taipei, Taiwan. COSCUP (Conference for Open Source Coders, Users and Promoters) is one of the largest open source conferences in Asia, and the community there is always engaged and technically sharp.
I have just returned from my first DataEngBytes conference in Sydney. Here is a quick summary on my thoughts for the event. I plan to go into more detail on great points from presentations in later posts.
The MITRE ATLAS Matrix provides a working knowledge base of adversary tactics, techniques, and real-world case studies specifically for Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) systems. It adapts the established MITRE ATT&CK adversary tactics and techniques matrix which is the standard reference for traditional IT cybersecurity.
Three frameworks form the analytical foundation of this series’ threat analysis, selected for their complementary coverage of the GenAI security landscape and their broad adoption across enterprise security practices. The MITRE Adversarial Threat Landscape for AI Systems (MITRE ATLAS) maps tactics and techniques specific to AI systems.
MySQL has dropped its newest release , categorized as “Early Access” and available at https://labs.mysql.com/ . While this post is not going to go into depth, I wanted to at least validate the management changes you verify between normal MySQL upgrades.
On a major financial institution website I was asked to complete a contact form. This organization has millions of existing customers. This is not a startup, yet the quality of work is something a junior developer would fail at an interview if they provided the answer.
In my previous post I made the case that the only post-quantum protection that counts is the algorithm your connection actually negotiates. This post is what happened when I checked my own laptop.
Every time you see the padlock in your browser, push code over SSH, or your application connects to a database, TLS or SSH is quietly doing two jobs. First, it proves you are talking to the real server and not an impostor.
VillageSQL has just released it’s latest version 0.0.5 , describing this as stable release for installations with full MySQL 8.4.10 compatibility. With my primary work around extensions, specifically vsql-statistics , I took the new versioning features for a test.
The interquartile range (IQR) measures the spread of the middle 50% of a distribution — the distance between the first quartile (Q1) and the third quartile (Q3). Combined with Tukey’s 1.
The mode is the value or values that appear most frequently in a dataset. Unlike the mean or median, it applies naturally to categorical and ordinal data — star ratings, product codes, survey responses — and reveals what is most common, not what is average.
MySQL offers three different approaches to extending the SQL capabilities with the default product you download and install. These are: User Defined Function (UDF) MySQL Manual MySQL Plugin MySQL Manual MySQL Component MySQL Manual In my prior post I provided a new uuidv function that accepted a numeric argument to return a string of the version of UUID specified.
MySQL’s built-in AVG() computes the arithmetic mean — the sum divided by the count. That is the right default for many questions, but it is not always the right measure of central tendency.
MySQL offers three different approaches to extending the SQL capabilities with the default product you download and install. These are: User Defined Function (UDF) MySQL Manual MySQL Plugin MySQL Manual MySQL Component MySQL Manual For the purposes of this post I will be using the current LTS version MySQL 8.
The one-sample Z-test determines whether a sample mean differs significantly from a known population mean when the population standard deviation is also known. It is the appropriate test when the population parameters are established — quality control benchmarks, national averages, long-run process measurements — and you want to evaluate whether a new sample is consistent with them.
You no longer need to manually parse the MySQL Error log via scripting and RegEx pattern matching. Using the component_log_sink_json component you can obtain JSON error logging for easier parsing.
Historically installing MySQL on a RedHat Compatible Linux server was as simple as yum install mysql-server. Today’s MySQL Oracle Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, and Fedora 9.7 instructions are not accurate mixing in 8.
If you have a typical MySQL production setup using MySQL 8.0 (EOL) with replication, you can take advantage of VillageSQL extensions to generate AI responses directly with your source data with no impact on your production setup or existing application software.
Skewness measures the asymmetry of a distribution. A perfectly symmetric distribution has a skewness of zero. A positive skew (right-skewed) means the tail extends to the right — a small number of high values pull the mean above the median.
The vsql-ai extension adds AI prompt capabilities and text embeddings directly in SQL queries, with support for Anthropic Claude , Google Gemini , OpenAI ChatGPT , or a local LLM such as Ollama .
The Chi-Squared test is one of the most widely used statistical tests for categorical data. It comes in two flavors: the goodness-of-fit test asks whether an observed frequency distribution matches an expected one, while the test of independence asks whether two categorical variables are associated with each other.
I am excited to be speaking at COSCUP 2026 in Taipei, Taiwan on August 8th and 9th. COSCUP (Conference for Open Source Coders, Users and Promoters) is one of the largest open source conferences in Asia, and it is always a privilege to present to the engaged and technically sharp community there.
The two sample t-test for equal variance is a statistical test to determine if the means of two groups are different enough that the difference is likely caused by some underlying difference, rather than random chance.
This is a technical walkthrough of the vsql-extension-builder recently released May 28 at Percona Live Bay Area 2026 and found at https://github.com/villagesql/villagesql-skills . Highlights Install VillageSQL pre-built binary first Install SDK with pre-built binary second Install the skill Run it with your AI tool The output can be found at https://github.
AI-Assisted SQL Tuning Last week in his keynote speech at Percona Live Bay Area 2026 , Andy Pavlo presented Databases: The Final Boss of Agents and provided some useful insights into query optimization of simulated workloads leveraging AI.
At the MySQL BR Conference 2025 I had the opportunity to speak about Improving Your MySQL Security Posture. You can find a copy of my slides on my Presentations , and a Portugese (Brazil) translation.
Last week I had the opportunity to speak at the MySQL and Heatwave Summit in San Francisco. I discussed the impact of the new MySQL 8.0 default caching_sha2_password authentication, replacing the mysql_native_password authentication that was the default for approximately 20 of the 30 years that MySQL has existed.
At the MySQL and Heatwave Summit 2025 today, Readyset announced a new data systems architecture pattern named Readyset QueryPilot . This architecture which can front a MySQL or PostgreSQL database infrastructure, combines the enterprise-grade ProxySQL and Readyset caching with intelligent query monitoring and routing to help support applications scale and produce more predictable results with…
In a CPU-bound database workload, regardless of price, would you scale-up or scale-new? What if price was the driving factor, would you scale-up or scale-new? I am using as a baseline the first available AWS Graviton2 processor for RDS (r6g).
As part of using public datasets with my own Benchmarking Suite I wanted upsize a dataset for larger volume testing. I have always used the INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLES data_length and index_length columns as a sufficiently accurate measurement for actual disk space used.
During my setup of benchmarking I run a quick test-sysbench script to ensure my configuration is right before running an hour+ duration test. When pointing to a Readyset cache where I have cached the 5 queries used in the sysbench test, but I have not run any execution of the SQL, throughput went up 10x in 5 seconds.
Higher throughput does not imply improved performance. This is a common problem when the need for an application to support more users, you provide higher concurrency and that appears to show the capability to support higher throughput.
Readyset is a next-generation database caching solution that offers a drop-in; no application code changes; approach to improve database performance. If you are using a legacy application where it is difficult to modify SQL statements, or the database is overloaded due to poorly-designed SQL access patterns, implementing a cache is a common design strategy for addressing database reliability and…
Sysbench is a popular open-source benchmarking tool designed to evaluate the performance of system components such as CPU, memory, disk I/O, and databases. It is commonly used for testing MySQL, PostgreSQL, and other databases under different load conditions.
AWS can drop 10+ articles a day just in the What’s New feed. You either need an eagle eye, or luck to keep up if you run multiple AWS database products across multiple regions and managing infrastructure.
Readyset is a database caching solution for MySQL and PostgreSQL . For applications that have increased load on your primary database, or use scale-out infrastructure to support a high-read workload, ReadySet can be a drop-in solution to address current performance issues.
Common benchmark approaches fall into two general categories, synthetic testing and realistic testing. You have the most generic operations from a synthetic test, starting with the most simple example using a single table, a single column, and for a single DML operation.
Testing and benchmarking are widely used terms in software technology, each serving a distinct purpose and goal. With the increasing adoption of AI in software development, the term evaluating has become significant and with this the re-emergence of what is quality assurance.
A common data security issue is the unprotected copying of production data to non-production environments without any redaction, masking, or filtering. This practice poses a serious risk. A malicious actor will target the weakest link in your infrastructure, including non-production accounts and the developer systems accessing them.
There are numerous Cloud Service Provider (CSP) FinOps products that can review, collate, summarize, and recommend ways to optimize your cloud spend. If you’re using one or more cloud providers and don’t actively manage your Cost and Usage Reports (CURs) on a daily basis, investing in such a product is a smart move.
Many companies manage production infrastructure using a reactive model rather than a proactive one. Organizations typically react to warnings and alerts, then implement corrective actions in response. While some companies have well-designed architectural patterns—such as feature flags and rate limiting—that can quickly mitigate the impact of issues, these are merely temporary solutions, not…
If you were following the AWS Re:invent keynote yesterday there were several data specific announcements including Aurora DSQL and S3 Tables . Wanting to check them out, I downloaded the latest AWS CLI 2.
The ongoing drama between Wordpress v WP Engine continues to cross my reading list, but I have permanently removed WordPress from my website. I have finally transitioned away from the complex Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP (LAMP) stack required for self-hosting WordPress on my professional website.
I recently became aware of WeSQL . A MySQL-compatible database that separates compute and storage, using S3 as the storage layer. The product uses a columnar format by default which is significantly more space-efficient than InnoDB.
SQL drift is a significant challenge that occurs when SQL statements from an existing system produce unexpected results after migration to a new environment or system. These issues manifest in several critical ways: SQL statements may generate new execution errors, experience significant performance degradation, or yield differences in data integrity.
Yesterday I detailed an incompatible breakage with RDS MySQL Aurora 3.06.0 , and one option stated is to upgrade to the just released 3.07.0. Turns out that does not work. It is not possible to upgrade any version of AWS RDS MySQL Aurora 3.
We know that SQL statement compatibility can change with major database version upgrades and that you should adequately test for them. But what about minor version upgrades? It is dangerous to assume that your existing SQL statements work with a minor update, especially when using an augmented version of an open-source database such as a cloud provider that may not be as transparent about all…