In the last few years there have been several examples of major service problems affecting businesses data: outages causing data inconsistencies; unavailability or data loss, and worldwide cyberattacks encrypting your files and asking for a ransom.

Database-related incidents are a very common industry issue- even if the root cause is not the database system itself. No matter if your main relational system is MySQL, MariaDB, PostgresQL or AWS Aurora -there will be a time where you will need to make use of backups to recover to a previous state. And when that happens it will be the worst time to realize that your backup system hadn’t been working for months, or testing for the first time a cluster-wide recovery.

Forget about the backups, it is all about recovery!

Let me be 100% clear: the question is not IF data …

I am happy that the MySQL team is, during the last years, blogging about each major feature that MySQL Server is getting; for example, the series on Recursive Common Table Expressions. Being extremely busy myself, …

Wikipedia is the greatest encyclopedia which has ever existed, because everyone can contribute to the massive knowledge corpus. Analyzing this data with computers is becoming more and more indispensable, as nobody can survey the information by hand anymore. In order to work with the data, we have to import it into MySQL and here is how it works.

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Wikipedia is the greatest encyclopedia which has ever existed, because everyone can contribute to the massive knowledge corpus. Analyzing this data with computers is becoming more and more indispensable, as nobody can survey the information by hand anymore. In order to work with the data, we have to import it into MySQL and here is how it works.

Read More »

Last week, 21-23 September, it took place the European MySQL Conference, or “Data performance Conference” as this year’s subtitle was “MySQL. NoSQL. Data in the cloud.”. This year, it changed its location from London to Amsterdam and, as most people I talked to agreed, the change was for good. As every year, Percona was the company organizing it, but it had the participation of all the major players in the open source MySQL/MongoDB/Cloud data world. Special mention goes to Booking.com, which had more …

For me, the biggest news in the last 24 hours so far has been:

1. SkySQL merges with Monty Program, developers of MariaDB. This of course affects me directly and leads to a change in affiliation in a few months.
2. TokuDB goes opensource. I think this is really big news. Beyond just the fact that it can now be a storage engine in the main MariaDB tree, I love the work they’re doing to extend it to be an engine for MongoDB as well.
3. …

This is a nice blog post from Asher Feldman, Site Architect, Wikipedia on how Wikipedia Adopts MariaDB. If you’re using English or German Wikipedia, or using Wikidata, you’re currently being served by MariaDB 5.5.

I think MariaDB has had a great few weeks recently and the timeline of these events are important.

1. 27 November 2012 – WiredTree Adds MariaDB for Faster MySQL Database Performance (well worth reading their motivations to switch)
2. 29 November 2012 – Monty Program & SkySQL release the MariaDB Client Library for C & Java
3. 4 December 2012 – MariaDB Foundation is announced, see ZDNet coverage.
4. mid-December 2012 – Wikimedia Foundation starts migrating …

The Maatkit article on Wikipedia was removed some time ago, after being deemed not notable. I believe this is no longer the case. It’s hard to find a credible book published on MySQL in the last few years that doesn’t mention Maatkit, there’s quite a bit of blogging about it from MySQL experts and prominent community members, and the toolkit is certainly in wide use — it’s important enough that notable companies are supporting its development. It’s available through every major Unix-like operating system’s package repository. On Debian, it’s actually part of the mysql-client package, so if you install MySQL, you automatically get Maatkit too. I believe it’s probably the second most important set of MySQL command-line tools; the most …

An unknown error connecting to MySQL on 10.0.6.28? Oh dear me… It came back up within 2 minutes though from the time I got the screenshot.