Time-travel SQL for MySQL, finally
A time ago I argued MySQL is the only major OLTP database without time-travel queries. Here’s what’s changed. Last month I mapped out how every major OLTP except…
Category: dbtrail
For a Database, survive used to mean “The server stays up”. With AI Agents, that’s not enough anymore
One of the 3 promise that a database do is: I will Survive. Traditionally it was physical: disk, memory, replication, OOM. The hardware side. With agents, that definition…
An AI Agent is talking to your MySQL. And the database doesn’t know who is that! – Agent Era, Part 3
You’re still running agents against MySQL. So am I. Last time we walked through what happens when an agent doesn’t understand the query it’s running. This week, what…
Three Promises in the Agent Era, Part 2: Agents on production MySQL are fine. Until they’re not.
You’re running agents against MySQL. So am I. It’s where we are. Sooner or later you’re going to be recovering data because of something one of them did.…
Three Promises in the Agent Era, Part 1: The Frame, Reread
The series: A few time ago I wrote that a database does three things: It executes queries. It manages relationships. It survives the physical machine it runs on.…
Every Major OLTP Has Time Travel. Except MySQL
If you’ve worked on Oracle, you know Flashback. Run a SELECT … AS OF TIMESTAMP, get the row as it existed yesterday at 2pm. Find who touched it…
Ask Claude what happened to your MySQL
Most teams running MySQL in production don’t have a DBA. They have a developer who set up RDS two years ago, automated snapshots they’ve never tested a restore…
Your MySQL Backups Won’t Pass a Compliance Audit Alone
Every compliance framework that touches data recovery says some version of the same thing: you need to be able to restore data, prove that you can, and show…
Your monitoring knows how your database is doing. It has no idea what happened to your data.
You’ve got Grafana dashboards. PMM is collecting metrics. Datadog has agents on every host. CloudWatch alarms are set up. You know your CPU is at 34%, your queries…
I spent 4 hours restoring a backup for one deleted row
Someone ran a DELETE without the right WHERE clause. One row gone. One customer record. And I spent the next four hours of my life getting it back.…