MySQL

To create a new MySQL data source:

  1. Work with your database administrator to:

    • decide whether you want to create a new database user for NOW Privacy or use an existing one

    • request the connection parameters that will allow you to get data from the database; you’ll use these in step 6

    NOW Privacy uses the JDBC API to communicate with target databases

  2. From the main menu select Data Sources

  3. Click New ⇾ New Data Source

  4. Select a dataset or add a new dataset and click Next

  5. Select the Database data source and click Next

  6. Choose MySQL

  7. Enter the connection parameters:

    Field

    Description

    Host

    The IP address or the fully qualified domain name of the target server.

    Database/Schema

    The name of the database you want to crawl. You can only target one database at a time.

    Port

    The port that MySQL is using. For example: 3306.

    Username

    A user who has read access to the data you want to crawl.

    Password

    The password for the user.

    NOW Privacy tries to connect to the database host

    If it fails, it prompts you to correct the parameters

  8. Select the table or view you want to crawl, or click Crawl Whole Schema

    If you choose a table or view, we’ll only crawl that data

    If you need to crawl another table or view, you’ll need to create another data source

    If you click Crawl Whole Schema, we’ll crawl every table we can in the schema

  9. Sample Size is optional; it allows you to sample the data rather than crawling every row

  10. Choose a unique identifier

    When you’ve selected the target table or view, choose the column to use as the primary identifier for a row (typically the primary key)

    You can select columns from the target table or view that should not be stored by NOW Privacy

  11. Identify versioning columns

    NOW Privacy can look at one or more columns to check whether any row has changed since we last crawled it

    For example, the database might have a customer_record_last_updated column

  12. Select the columns you want NOW Privacy to look at

  13. Map columns to NOW Privacy fields

    The last step in configuring the database connection is to choose how individual columns should be mapped to the existing NOW Privacy metadata fields

    You can create compound mappings and new custom fields

  14. Select the country for this data source and click Next

    The country is used in geographical visualisations

  15. Optionally, click Add Custom Description

    This allows you to use you own description for this data source, rather than accept the default description that NOW Privacy provides

  16. Set the Crawl priority

  17. Specify whether you want to crawl once or continuously

  18. Click Start Crawl Immediately if you want to crawl the data right now

    Or you can start a crawl manually anytime you want

  19. Click Create Data Source

SSL connections

By default, the MySQL data source is configured to work without SSL. If you need to use SSL, please contact the NowVertical Support team.

Changing the primary key

When you’re using the option to crawl an entire schema, be careful not to change a primary key.

If you ingest the data for an entire schema, then change a primary key, and then re-crawl the data, NOW Privacy will not recognise the ‘new’ version of the data it sees. It will:

  • assume you deleted all the rows from that row for that primary key

  • ingest the data as if it were a new row

This slows down the recrawl and means that any tags you have added are lost.