Ronald Bradford - Data Architect, MySQL Expert, Author & Speaker on Enterprise Data Architect | Principal Data Strategist | MySQL Subject Matter Expert | Author | Speaker

VillageSQL published Access MySQL over MCP with vsql-mcp .

For this quick verification of the 0.0.7 development branch of VillageSQL with the new vsql-vector plugin.

At PyCon AU 2026 , the presentation Your Python container is 90% stuff you didn’t ask for by Scott Norris at Chainguard really exposed the impact of being lazy in container management for security purposes.

PyCon AU 2026 held in Brisbane this week was a five day event for the Python community.

I previously came across an issue in my benchmarking work where I relied on the Latency Histogram section of sysbench output.

In Curated MySQL Data Sets for Realistic Testing I described datasets assembled the manual way — download, schema, load, validate, document — over hours or days per source.

Let’s say you’re building a reference table from source data, e.g. a silver medallion table from a primary source.

Clean data is one of those terms everyone uses and few define precisely.

Synthetic benchmarks have their place, but I have always preferred working with real data.

I recently had the pleasure of presenting Planning your upgrade to MySQL 9.7 at COSCUP 2026 in Taipei, Taiwan.

I have just returned from my first DataEngBytes conference in Sydney.

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.

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.

MySQL has dropped its newest release , categorized as “Early Access” and available at https://labs.mysql.com/ .

On a major financial institution website I was asked to complete a contact form.

In my previous post I made the case that the only post-quantum protection that counts is the algorithm your connection actually negotiates.

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.

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.

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).

The mode is the value or values that appear most frequently in a dataset.

MySQL offers three different approaches to extending the SQL capabilities with the default product you download and install.

MySQL’s built-in AVG() computes the arithmetic mean — the sum divided by the count.

MySQL offers three different approaches to extending the SQL capabilities with the default product you download and install.

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.

You no longer need to manually parse the MySQL Error log via scripting and RegEx pattern matching.

Historically installing MySQL on a RedHat Compatible Linux server was as simple as yum install mysql-server.

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 so…

Skewness measures the asymmetry of a distribution.

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.

I am excited to be speaking at COSCUP 2026 in Taipei, Taiwan on August 8th and 9th.

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 .

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.

Last week I had the opportunity to speak at the MySQL and Heatwave Summit in San Francisco.

At the MySQL and Heatwave Summit 2025 today, Readyset announced a new data systems architecture pattern named Readyset QueryPilot .

In a CPU-bound database workload, regardless of price, would you scale-up or scale-new?

As part of using public datasets with my own Benchmarking Suite I wanted upsize a dataset for larger volume testing.

During my setup of benchmarking I run a quick test-sysbench script to ensure my configuration is right before running an hour+ duration test.

Higher throughput does not imply improved performance.

Readyset is a next-generation database caching solution that offers a drop-in; no application code changes; approach to improve database performance.

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.

AWS can drop 10+ articles a day just in the What’s New feed.

Readyset is a database caching solution for MySQL and PostgreSQL .

Common benchmark approaches fall into two general categories, synthetic testing and realistic testing.

Testing and benchmarking are widely used terms in software technology, each serving a distinct purpose and goal.

A common data security issue is the unprotected copying of production data to non-production environments without any redaction, masking, or filtering.

There are numerous Cloud Service Provider (CSP) FinOps products that can review, collate, summarize, and recommend ways to optimize your cloud spend.

Many companies manage production infrastructure using a reactive model rather than a proactive one.