Earlier today I asked on this blog and everywhere else people to fill in a simple survey of how do they use MySQL, which one and what should I focus on. I already have more than 30 answers (don’t stop answering, keep providing more) so I will have to publish the results and do something with them. But first I’ll let the survey run for at least a week Oh, and even though I write MySQL, this post is general about all MySQL variants (MariaDB, MySQL Cluster, … (not counting Drizzle)).
Now what is behind this survey? Well, I have a lot of stuff to do and MySQL is not my only responsibility. And I know that sometimes it can use some extra hands. Sometimes I get lucky and we have new beta packaged same day as it …

This is not really a blog post. I just would like to know you opinion on state of MySQL at openSUSE and openSUSE Build Service. But I’m interested in your feedback even if you are not using openSUSE or even if you are not using packages I provide. As my TODO is quite long and I can’t do everything, I would like to know what should I pay the most attention to. Later I will publish a post about the current state of MySQL and how you can participate

Whenever I start a new project with MySQL or MariaDB I am tempted to jump in and start creating my schema and tables with nothing more than a basic outline of the requirements. Often the justification I give myself is that the sooner I have something up and running, the better off I'll be, and besides, there will be plenty of time to sort things out later. Even when I am absolutely sure my ad-hoc schema is only for "development purposes" and will "never ever be used in production" it often is.

A lot of grief can be avoided if time is taken right at the start, before any tables are defined, to plan. This is big picture time and every stakeholder, from IT to the developers to management and even to marketing, needs to be involved. If for no other reason than to set expectations.

Right at the start, everyone involved in the project needs to know that there is no perfect data definition, and no one …

One issue that developers often run into is needing or wanting to run a development version of MariaDB or MySQL on their desktop when there is already a production version installed. You may want to try out a new feature, or experiment with a patch, or maybe you're developing a new storage engine, or just having fun hacking on the code. Whatever the reason, when this happens to me I often want to be able to run the non-standard version without replacing my currently installed version.

Fortunately, the process for doing so is easy. The instructions below are adapted from the Running MariaDB from the source directory article in the AskMonty Knowledgebase.

Before beginning, make sure you shut down your running instance of mysqld before starting your test instance. It is possible to run multiple mysqlds on the same server, but doing so is …

A common error in SQL is with quotes. Luckily, compared to other databases, MariaDB and MySQL are very forgiving.

For example, suppose I have a "products" table for an online store. If I want to look up every product which has a price of 5.99 or more I might use the following query:

MariaDB [crashcourse]> select prod_id, prod_name, prod_price from products
    -> where prod_price >= 5.99;
+---------+----------------+------------+
| prod_id | prod_name      | prod_price |
+---------+----------------+------------+
| ANV01   | .5 ton anvil   |       5.99 |
| ANV02   | 1 ton anvil    |       9.99 |
| ANV03   | 2 ton anvil    |      14.99 |
| OL1     | Oil can        |       8.99 |
| TNT2    | TNT (5 sticks) |      10.00 |
| FB      | Bird seed      |      10.00 |
| SAFE    | Safe           |      50.00 |
| DTNTR   | Detonator      |      13.00 |
| JP1000  | JetPack 1000   |      35.00 |
| JP2000  | JetPack 2000   |      55.00 | …

“I want to ensure that the MySQL code base (under the name of MariaDB) will survive as open source, in spite of what Oracle may do.” -- Michael “Monty” Widenius. Michael “Monty” Widenius is the main author of the original version of the open-source MySQL database and a founding member of the MySQL AB company. [...]

I’m sure you are aware that the last Percona server release includes a new improved MEMORY storage engine for MySQL.
This new engine is based on Dynamic Row Format and offers some of great features, specialy for VARCHAR, VARBINARY, TEXT and BLOB fields in MEMORY tables.

But because this new MEMORY engine by Percona has some limitations and because Percona server hasn’t used it for its internal temporary tables yet, I would like to talk about what can be the real benefits to have a brand new MEMORY engine based on Dynamic row format specialy for internal memory tables.

Just remember or discover how MySQL uses …

Some so-called “Green” harddisks don’t like being in a RAID array. These are primarily SATA drives, and they gain their green credentials by being able reduce their RPM when not in use, as well as other aggressive power management trickery. That’s all cool and in a way desirable – we want our hardware to use less power whenever possible! – but the time it takes some drives to “wake up” again is longer than a RAID setup is willing to tolerate.

First of all, you may wonder why I bother with SATA disks at all for RAID. I’ve written about this before, but they simply deliver plenty for much less money. Higher RPM doesn’t necessarily help you for a db-related (random access) workload, and for tasks like backups which do have a lot of speed may not be a primary concern. SATA disks have a shorter command queue than SAS, so that means they might need to seek more – however a smart RAID controller would already arrange its I/O …

 Oracle starts charging for MySQL Add-ons

Exciting news, Oracle just announced commercial MySQL extensions that they'll be offering paid extensions to the core MySQL free product.

To be sure, this has raised waves of concern among the community, but on the whole I suspect it will be a good thing for MySQL.  This brings more commercial addons to the table, which only increases the options for customers.  Many will continue to use the core database product only, and avoid license hassles while others will surely embark on a hybrid approach if it solves their everyday business problems.

Speaking of licensing, back in May, Amazon announced that it's RDS or Relational Database Service would now offer Oracle as an option. …

One could say that MariaDB now is 2 years old as a packaged product. The latest version, MariaDB 5.3 Beta, is the culmination of many years of hard work. We believe it contains the largest and most significant change to the code of MySQL since the launch of MySQL 5.0. I’m talking about the changes made to the central product component called the Optimizer.

Why did we touch something so central to the product? The fast answer is that the original Optimizer is about 17 years old. Prior to the work we did for MariaDB 5.3, the Optimizer hadn’t had any huge evolutionary improvements or changes in a decade (except for some features that were added in 2003-2005). It was missing basic functionality that one can expect in any 2010s relational database. Things like hash joins or efficient handling of subqueries.

We’ve also wanted to gradually make MariaDB better at handling bigger tables and bigger queries. This requires query plans to …