Isolation is an important part of ACID properties that guarantee that transactions are processed in a reliable manner. But there are four different levels of isolation available and you have to understand each one of them to be able to select the correct one for your needs. This post intends on explaining the four levels together with their effects on locking and performance.

Backups are an integral and very important part of any system. Backups allow you to recover your data and be up and running again, in the advent of problems such as system crashes, hardware failures or users deleting data by mistake. I had been evaluating backup solution for a while but to be honest I really wasn't satisfied with the solutions available until I came across XtraBackup and I am loving it since. In this post I intend on showing how to do backups and restores using XtraBackup.

Replication as most people know it, has mostly been SQL statement propagation from master to slave. This is known as "statement-based" replication. But there is also another kind of replication that is available, "the row-based replication" and that has quite a lot of benefits. In this post I intend on highlighting the advantages and disadvantages of both the types of replication to help you choose the best one. I also follow up with my own recommendation.

Although MyISAM has been the default storage engine for MySQL but its soon going to change with the release of MySQL server 5.5. Not only that, more and more people are shifting over to the Innodb storage engine and the reasons for that is the tremendous benefits, not only in terms of performance, concurrency, ACID-transactions, foreign key constraints, but also because of the way it helps out the DBA with hot-backups support, automatic crash recovery and avoiding data inconsistencies which can prove to be a pain with MyISAM. In this article I try to hammer out the reasons why you should move on to using Innodb instead of MyISAM.