In less than a month I'll be giving these two talks at Percona Live:

• common_schema: DBA's framework for MySQL

If you are still unfamiliar with common_schema, this will make for a good introduction. I'll give you multiple reasons why you would want to use it, and how it would come to immediate use at your company. I do mean immediate, as in previous common_schema presentations I happened to get feedback emails from attendees within the same or next day letting me know how common_schema solved an insistent problem of theirs or how it exposed an unknown status.

I'll review

Digging through piles of old stuff in the house, I came across a nice little artifact of MySQL history, an old business card. One benefit of a small company is that you can tend to get your first name @company.com, which of course, I had.

I wonder which other MySQL AB employees still have a business card laying around somewhere?

Firebird is an open-source DBMS with a long history and good SQL support. Although I measured Firebird's importance as smaller than MySQL's or MariaDB's, it exists, and might grow a bit when Firebird becomes the default LibreOffice DBMS.

I decided to compare the current versions of MySQL 5.6 and Firebird SQL 2.5. I only looked at features that end users can see, without benchmarking. Preparing for the comparison was easy. I looked at the instructions for downloading Firebird with Ubuntu and within 15 minutes I was entering SQL statements.

Getting started with MariaDB, by Daniel Bartholomew, is a good book for people who wants to approach MariaDB without knowing MySQL. While this book covers all basic topics, it provides a vast overview of what MariaDB is and can do. In other words: the text is not just about SQL queries.

The book also mentions topics that are not strictly related to MariaDB, but are important for MariaDB users; for

We've got some spare time on Percona Live during the lightning talks session, and are spontaneously calling for "Hall of Shame" submissions.

What is this about?

We just had a wonderful Reversim Summit a couple weeks back, where we held the "Hall of Shame" session. We are used to hear talks about success stories and great new technologies. Well, this session is your chance to come up and say: "I messed up, and I'm proud of it!"

You will have 3-4 minutes to tell us about how you once accidentally dropped your database; corrupted your data; brought your company's service down. The greater the damage, the greater the appeal! But we're looking for the funny edge - not for a tragedy. There are no slides. Just a "Hall of Shame" screen behind you.

The response we got on Reversim Summit? It

I love it when software gives you elegant ways of solving your problem. Programming language designers make me feel like they care when they take the time to include succinct, powerful expressions. I’ve recently discovered some in new things in MySQL, as well as a few rediscoveries. This is the first five, and I’ll cover the next five in another article.

In

You’ve probably used the standard In operator before:

Select 'Oh yeah!' From dual Where 1 In (1,2,3);

As a side note, the dual table is just a dummy table that always returns one row. It’s useful for demonstrating language features or running experiments.

You can also use a subquery with In:

Select 1 From dual Where 1 In (Select 1);

The thing I discovered was that

Now I’m back in the MySQL fold, I’ve got the opportunity to speak at Percona Live again. I’ve always enjoyed speaking at this conference (back when it was known by another name…), although I need to up my game and do the 6 talks I did back in 2009.

On the Tuesday afternoon, tutorials day, I’m running a half-day session with my replication colleague Linas Virbalas. This will be similar to the session I did at Percona Live London, and cover some of the more advanced content on replication, including, but not limited to:

• Filters
• JavaScript Filtering
• Some fun and practical filters
• Heterogeneous replication from MySQL out to MongoDB, Vertica, Oracle and Hadoop

I might even choose to demo

Time to admit to myself: mycheckpoint has to be discontinued.

I started mycheckpoint back in 2009, as a free & open source lightweight monitoring tool for MySQL. Over some years it evolved and became an actual (lightweight) monitoring solution, used by many. It has a unique and original design, which, alas, is also its bane.

mycheckpoint uses the relational model & SQL to store and query monitored metrics. This leads to quite a sophisticated service, which can make practically anything visible to the user. The raw data is just numbers. but with some SQL-Fu one can generate charts out of it,  (

In my previous role as the manager of an enterprise-grade public cloud, I’ve had the opportunity to work with many enterprises from across industries and across the world. All of these companies were looking for new ways to better understand and serve their customers, to improve efficiency, and improve their financials. There were many different approaches, but they all had one thing in common; it is all about data. Every day nearly 4 exabytes of data is created. This data holds great value for business, science and society. However, in order to extract that value, data needs to be stored, secured, managed and analysed. This is why I am excited to join SkySQL, a company that is at the forefront of driving innovation in databases.

Big Data is a big topic - and depending on who you’re talking to, it can mean very different things. There are two

True, GTID is upon us whether via MySQL 5.6 or Tungsten Replicator (and wasn't it in Google Patches since 2009?).

But some of us are still using standard replication with MySQL 5.5, and the "what's with all these binary log files and positions" question is ever erupting. The output of SHOW SLAVE STATUS confuses people new to it. It confuses me time and again.

So here's the semi visual guide to interpreting the SHOW SLAVE STATUS.

About binary logs and relay logs

A master writes binary logs. These are typically and conventionally called mysql-bin.##### or mysqld-bin.##### (replace ##### with digits).

A slave connects to its master, and reads entries from the master's binary logs. The slave writes those entries into its own relay logs. These are

Devart is glad to announce the release of the new versions of dotConnect for Oracle, dotConnect for MySQL, dotConnect for PostgreSQL, dotConnect for SQLite, and dotConnect for DB2 - enhanced database connectivity solutions, built over the ADO.NET architecture, that support Entity Framework and LinqConnect ORM solutions. New versions of dotConnect data providers offer you support for ASP.NET Identity technology.

I want to teach you the difference between an inner and an outer join. We first need to think about what a join is. Simply, it’s when you combine two tables to make a new one. You’re not physically creating a new table when you join them together, but for the purposes of the query, you are creating a new virtual table. Every row now has the columns from both tables. So if TableA has columns Col1 and Col2 and TableB has columns Col3 and Col4, when you join these two tables, you’ll get Col1, Col2, Col3, and Col4. Just as with any query, you have the option of including all columns or excluding some, as well as filtering out rows.

Inner join. A join is combining the rows from two tables. An inner join