What will be the profile of  MySQL DBA?
A true MySQL DBA is an courageous problem solver, At times he/she is expected to remain calm and address the problem than getting sensitive/emotional (many times I was called for emergency support during personal vacations, I am ok with it because it’s the nature of my Job!! ) because anything happen to MySQL Infrastructure you will be blamed (even when it’s not your mistake) so be cool and never ever get into panic/anxiety situation (practice meditation & yoga, It will support you at personal level during turbulence) with any level of odd experience in your MySQL Operations, Expect the worst and be prepared for it ! Remember Murphy’s law “whatever can go wrong, will go wrong ! ” . Now on technical competency front every MySQL DBA is expected to know MySQL Architecture, MySQL Operations Management (Monitoring & Trending), MySQL Troubleshooting, MySQL Performance, MySQL High Availability and Disaster Recovery. Thankfully MySQL ecosystem is rich when it comes to knowledge sharing and support.  Percona’s investments in MySQL research and innovation made MySQL DBA ecosystem more stronger and healthy ! The following are few books (must have) in every MySQL DBA library:

1. High Performance MySQL (Peter Zaitsev, Vadim Tkachenko and Baron Schwartz )
2. MySQL Troubleshooting (Sveta Smirnova)
3. Expert MySQL (Charles Bell)

 What makes you The Expert MySQL DBA ?
Practice, Practice & More Practice over multiple MySQL (MySQL GA, Percona Server, WebScaleSQL and MariaDB) infrastructure and continuous learning is key! MySQL DBAs need to automate their routine tasks to find more time for learning, community contributions  and attending MySQL events (You can learn a lot from these events from peers & experts !). Be open to learn from every MySQL flavour (MySQL GA, Percona Server, WebScaleSQL and MariaDB) available  this get you to be an unbiased MySQL advocate. Take the full ownership of your MySQL Infrastructure like Performance, Scalability, High Availability, Disaster Recovery and Security because strategically/economically it never make sense for hiring multiple MySQL DBAs for addressing different areas of MySQL Operations! Last but not the least never limit your scope to just MySQL because most of MySQL implementations are on Linux, Good understanding of Linux Operations comes handy many times in your career so please do some investments for learning Linux!!!

Where do I start my career as MySQL DBA?
Once you have basic knowledge in MySQL DBA Operations, Start actively networking with MySQL DBA Managers and Database Architects. The initial days please don’t expect challenging opportunities, There is nobody in this planet who risk their mission critical MySQL database with junior DBA(s) ! The early days of your career sometimes will be limited to assisting Principal / Sr. MySQL DBAs but this will give you access to experience/knowledge of someone who is working with MySQL production infrastructure for many years. The early days of your career as Jr. MySQL DBA is very important because it equally provide to guidance and practice governance in MySQL Operations Management successfully. You must never get bored doing repetitive tasks initial years !!

What does MySQL consultant career path look like?
The value of MySQL consultant grows higher with more years of experience and volume/transaction of MySQL database he/she managed. If you have entrepreneurial interests the independent MySQL contractor (I am an independent MySQL contractor for many years) is very promising, exciting and rewarding!

How MySQL DBAs can equally create  business value
Faster, Scalable & Highly Available MySQL infrastructure is very important for successfully running planet-scale Internet/Mobility Application or SaaS. Think about “Cost-To-MySQL-Outage” for an online commerce or advertisement network business? A seasoned  MySQL DBA should proactively plan Optimal, Scalable, Highly Available and Secured MySQL Operations to address customer experience & revenue!

So have you decided to be a MySQL DBA?    
Good luck !! Start your learning with an positive mind and spend all your productive hours in reading the research & experience of many professional MySQL consultants (there are many available in public domain already!)

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MySQL Data Dictionary

In the past MySQL data dictionary was stored in metadata files and nontransactional tables but from MySQL 8 we have transactional data dictionary to store the information about database objects. The major difference between MySQL system tables and data dictionary tables is that system tables contain auxiliary data such as time zone and help information, whereas data dictionary tables contain data required to execute SQL queries. The dictionary data is now protected by the same commit, rollback, and crash-recovery capabilities that protect user data stored in InnoDB tables. This make MySQL data dictionary based object management more interesting.

P.S – InnoDB storage engine continues to use its own storage engine-specific data dictionary.

MySQL 8 supports Roles

MySQL 8 supports roles, They are collections of privileges which are granted to and revoked from user accounts. A much waited feature IMHO, Especially when I am working for customers who are serious about building secured privileges / policies across MySQL users, Eureka I have answer for all those folks now !!!

InnoDB AUTO_INCREMENT

MySQL 5.7 and earlier, the auto-increment counter is stored only in main memory, not on disk. To initialize an auto-increment counter after a server restart, InnoDB would execute the equivalent of the following statement on the first insert into a table containing an AUTO_INCREMENT column. From MySQL 8 this behaviour has changed, The current maximum auto-increment counter value is written to the redo log each time it changes and is saved to an engine-private system table on each checkpoint. These changes make the current maximum auto-increment counter value persistent across server restarts. On a server restart following a normal shutdown, InnoDB initializes the in-memory auto-increment counter using the current maximum auto-increment value stored in the data dictionary system table. On a server restart during crash recovery, InnoDB initializes the in-memory auto-increment counter using the current maximum auto-increment value stored in the data dictionary system table and scans the redo log for auto-increment counter values written since the last checkpoint. This feature will increase performance of MySQL operations with several schema objects built with AUTO_INCREMENT counter.

Deadlock detection disabling

We can now dynamically set innodb_deadlock_detect in MySQL 8 which is used to disable deadlock detection. On high concurrency systems, deadlock detection can cause a slowdown when numerous threads wait for the same lock. After carefully evaluating the transaction behaviour of your application you can disable deadlock detection and rely on the innodb_lock_wait_timeout setting for transaction rollback when a deadlock occurs. I will be personally very careful using this feature, Good but too powerful too !

INNODB_CACHED_INDEXES

The INFORMATION_SCHEMA table, INNODB_CACHED_INDEXES, reports the number of index pages cached in the InnoDB buffer pool for each index. This really helps to measure index efficiency more proactively and I am sure this will help me a lot going forward !

Invisible indexes

MySQL 8 now support invisible index, These indexes are not used by optimizer at all but maintained normally like any other indexes, This enables Database Architects / DBAs / Database Engineers / DBA Managers to benchmark MySQL performance on what if any index is removed ? I personally love this feature and will be using this most often in real-life as a MySQL 8 DBA to decide the fate of indexes, Great feature to have !

Much better descending indexes

Yes, We have descending indexes in MySQL 5.7 but they are scanned reverse order which indeed causes performance bottleneck. MySQL 8 solved this problem, Now descending indexes can be scanned in forward order, which is much more performance conscious and optimal . The descending indexes also make it possible for the optimizer to use multiple-column indexes when the most efficient scan order mixes ascending order for some columns and descending order for others. I was waiting for this feature for several years and this will make sort / search of both ASC/DESC based queries equally efficient, Must use feature in MySQL 8 to make your application more index efficient.

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