MySQL metadata collector

The MySQL metadata collector provides read-only access to metadata from an external MySQL database.

This collector is designed to directly harvest metadata from your MySQL server. It is suitable for both self-hosted MySQL instances and managed MySQL instances, such as those hosted on AWS RDS. This collector also works with MariaDB instances.

Metadata cataloged

The collector catalogs the following information.

Table 1. Metadata harvested

Object	Information cataloged
Columns	Name, Description, JDBC type, Column Type, Is Nullable, Default Value, Key type (Primary, foreign), column size, column index
Table	Name, description, primary key, schema
Table Index	Index Cardinality, Column name, Index Type, Index Name, is non Unique, Ordinal Position, Pages, Sort Sequence
Views	Name, description, SQL definition
Schema	Identifier, Name
Database	Type, name, identifier, server, port, environment, JDBC URL
Function	Name, Description, Function Type
Stored Procedure	Name, Description, Stored Procedure Type

If you include the profiling and sampling specific parameters while running the collector, the following additional information is harvested for Columns.

Note:

The user/role must have read access to data to be able to harvest profiling information (column statistics).

Table 2. Profiling and sampling specific information

Object	Information cataloged
Column	Average Length (sample) Average Value (sample) Data Distribution Distinct Values Estimated Distinct Values Estimated Non-null Values Maximum Length (sample) Maximum Value (sample) sorted numerically or alphabetically (z-a) Minimum Length (sample) Minimum Value (sample) sorted numerically or alphabetically (a-z) Non-null Values (sample) Sample String Values (first 5 items in a column)
Table	Row Count Sample Count (Target sample size)

Relationships between objects

The harvested metadata includes catalog pages for the following data asset types. Each catalog page has a relationship to the other related data asset types.

Table 3. Relationships between harvested data asset pages

Data asset page	Relationship
Table	Columns, Table Indexes
Columns	Table
Schema	Database that contains Schema, Table that is part of Schema
Database	Schema contained in Database

Authentication supported

The MySQL collector supports username/password authentication to MySQL.

• Prepare to run the MySQL collector
  Create a MySQL user and grant permissions before running the collector.
• Create a MySQL metadata collector
  Create a collector to import metadata from MySQL.