MySQL Cluster 7.3 went GA yesterday and with it came a new member of the MySQL Cluster API family: mysql-js – a native Node.js connector. mysql-js uses the NDB API to connect directly to the data nodes which improves performance compared to executing queries through the MySQL nodes.

For an introduction to mysql-js and installation instructions I will recommend taking a look at the official API documentation and Andrew Morgan’s blog; the latter also has an overview of the new features in MySQL Cluster 7.3 in general.

To get a feel for how the new API works, I went ahead and created …

Due to a bug in our release packaging scripts, the wrong version of the man pages, with the wrong license text, were copied into the MySQL Server GPL packages. The MySQL Man Pages continue to be available under GPL. The MySQL Server GPL packages will be corrected ASAP. You can read and follow the public bug here.

We apologize for the confusion this has caused. As always, please feel free to contact us, to ask about changes that you are wondering about.  Reporting a bug is always a good way to communicate with us.

Have a Happy GPL Midsummer, Tomas

In many environments MySQL is not the only technology used to store in-process data.

Quite frequently, especially with large-scale or complicated applications, we use MySQL alongside other technologies for certain tasks of reporting, caching as well as main data-store for portions of application.

What technologies for data storage and processing do you use alongside MySQL in your environment? Please feel free to elaborate in the comments about your use case and experiences!

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

The post What technologies are you running alongside MySQL? appeared first on …

The home screen of MySQL Workbench is the first thing you see when you start up the application and it’s therefor an important hub to quickly reach important parts or do repeating tasks like opening certain connections. This article describes the home screen in some detail with additional info and tips.

There are 3 areas with the connection area being the biggest one which you can also expand by resizing the application window. In the rare case you need a very small window or have many entries each area has a paging control to flip between different parts of a listing.

Shortcuts – a direct wire to your plugins, docs and support sites

The shortcuts section is what the starters used to be in pre-6.0 versions. The entries in this area are read from the file predefined_starters.xml. If there is a file user_starters.xml in …

I just installed 5.7.1 on Windows and next up was to build it from source on Windows, so that’s what I did, and thought I’d share the steps.

** Prerequisites **

1. Install Microsoft Visual Studio (I installed VS 2010 Express – free)
2. Install cmake
3. Install bison (make sure no spaces in path)

** Build Instructions **

cd c:\mysql\mysql-5.7.1
mkdir bld
cd bld
cmake ..
cmake --build . --config relwithdebinfo --target package

And here is the full output for anyone who might be interested:

C:\Windows\system32>cd C:\mysql\mysql-5.7.1

C:\mysql\mysql-5.7.1>mkdir bld

C:\mysql\mysql-5.7.1>cd bld

C:\mysql\mysql-5.7.1\bld>cmake ..
-- Building for: Visual Studio 10
-- Running cmake version 2.8.11.1
-- Configuring with MAX_INDEXES = 64U
-- The C compiler identification is MSVC 16.0.30319.1
-- The CXX compiler …

Today I had intended to talk about my approach and thought process in configuring a fresh MySQL server running 5.6 with the InnoDB storage engine. However, it didn’t quite work out that way. I managed to get side-tracked by decision #0 - whether or not durability is important.

Introduction

By default, MySQL is configured to lie to you. That is that when you modify data there are no guarantees that your changes will be able to survive a catastrophic failure, or to put in simple terms: a power loss. The advantage of doing this, is MySQL is able to perform additional buffering and merging and consequently achieve better performance. However, the downside is also very clear: losing data is problematic, so you need to decide what is appropriate for your use-case.

I tend to argue that there are only two options of …

I see my role as enabling others. When I was a pure awesome DBA in the early 2000s I enabled developers and customers of a companies product by making mySQL fault-tolerant and fast. As I moved up the stack as an Architect while still holding onto my roots as a DBA-I kept my DBA discipline by enabling my team and company through all the knowledge I garnered.
The first thing I identified in China that can really help my team-members is making a new development environment. The reason, the production and dev environments are wildly different. Dev is on Windows while production runs various flavors of Linux's 2.6 Kernel-mostly Centos-6. Additionally when the code is ready to be push to what I like to call pre-integration servers-meaning the code is not checked in but copied to a test server then checked in if the tests past. As a result developers spend time organizing which test server to use and this server can only be used while …

Hat tip to Colin Charles at MariaDB for this: http://blog.mariadb.org/mysql-man-pages-silently-relicensed-away-from-gpl Why is this important?  The MySQL documentation already has a restrictive license.  This means that it’s illegal to redistribute the MySQL documentation.  As a counterexample, the PHP documentation is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license, and there are many mirrors of it.  If one [...]

As documented in the MySQL Reference Manual:

a UNIQUE index permits multiple NULL values for columns that can contain NULL.

There are many scenarios in which this behavior is desirable. For example imagine you create a user table and require an email address, but you want username to be optional. You make the username column nullable, but you also want to make sure all non-null values in the column are unique, so it makes sense to add a UNIQUE INDEX. If the UNIQUE INDEX didn't allow multiple NULL values then you would need to move the username column to a separate table in order to both maintain uniqueness and allow users without usernames.

But there are also plenty of scenarios where this behavior can cause problems. For example, consider aggregated …

We maintain a lot of servers under Kinja, so we have to use some orchestrator software to perform some tasks on a lot of servers. The Ansbile software is used by us, because it is cool.

We have also a lot of MySQL servers (and counting!) under Kinja, so we have some tasks to perform on them, such as managing replication. Of course there are some ways to do this, for example using multiplexed terminals, or run ansibile shell commands what performs mysql queries (e.g. ansible mysql-master1 -m shell -a “mysql -e “SOME SQL QUERY HERE”) but it is not too comfy, and needs a lot of manual work.

So, there is a way to make it easier for us, and that’s why I made a mysql_replication module for ansible. (And I made a pull request for that on GitHub, so I hope it will be merged soon to ‘official’ branch)

The mysql_replication module helps you to

…