A very special MySQL DBA Class will be held October 14th at Oracle Headquarters. The MySQL DBA Training On Demand Class (5.5 version) is currently the 8th best delivering TOD at Oracle in terms of student numbers and the MySQL DBA 5.6 course has been consistently been in the top 40 out of 1000s of titles at Oracle since the beginning of this financial year. But this class will on version 5.6 and seats are available!

What is TOD? It is where you follow video delivery of event at your own pace, and schedule access to course environment lab exercises at your own convenience. An instructor is available to answer any questions you have online. This class will be where the TOD materials are recorded. TODs are important for the MySQL area because this flexible, no travel …

Now with summer winding down and school back in session, we get into a very busy time with many great opportunities to discover more about MySQL with several excellent MySQL events.

At first I wanted to cover all autumn events here but if I did that this post would be far too long. So instead I’m focusing on a few wonderful MySQL events that I’m going to be involved with in September.

In a few short days we’re running Percona University at Washington, D.C. This free event on September 12 provides a great opportunity to learn about latest developments in the MySQL ecosystem as we at Percona see it. I personally will be speaking about …

I open this blog to announce that I will be speaking at MySQL Connect in 2 weeks.

 I will present a conference session :

• 50 Tips for Boosting MySQL Performance [CON2655], Saturday 21 Sept, 1PM

and a tutorial session :

• Enhancing Productivity with MySQL 5.6 New Features [TUT8131], Monday, Sep 23, 1:15 PM  

I am very happy to be part of this great event and to be able to meet the MySQL Community, our customers and my colleagues there. Looking forward to seeing you !

It is not too late to register !!

…

Cool project. I’m really excited to see the results. 🙂 keep going

The MySQL engineering team constantly works to bring you huge performance improvements with each new release of MySQL. Here are four ways to help you get the most from these improvements

Tap into Sveta Smirnova's MySQL performance expertise on October 1st 2013 at 10am Central European Time, by attending the 1-day virtual seminar, Troubleshooting MySQL Performance with Sveta Smirnova. Sveta starts with basics, working towards more advanced cases that DBAs usually need years of experience to identify or solve. Click here to learn more about this seminar and to register for the event.

The …

The pace of MySQL engineering has been pretty brisk for the last few years. I think that most of the credit is due to Oracle, but one should not ignore Percona, Monty Program, Facebook, Google, Twitter, and others. Not only are these organizations (and the individuals I haven’t mentioned) innovating a lot, they’re providing pressure on Oracle to keep up the improvements, too. But if you look back over the last few years, MySQL is still functionally a lot like it used to be.

A loadbalancer is used in many MySQL setups. Loadbalancing can be done with an hardware loadbalancer or with software. Software solutions tend to be a fair bit cheaper.

Loadbalancing is often implemented as an extra layer: The application connects to the loadbalancer via the network and the loadbalancer connects to the database via the network. The loadbalancing can be implemented on the application machines to get rid of the extra layer, this is better for latency (each layer adds latency) and as each application server has it's own loadbalancer it can also remove bottlenecks. The drawback are that you'll lose a single point of control and with multiple loadbalancers the number of health check queries will probably increase. The two-layer setup is often used with Connector/J and haproxy.

There are simple and more intelligent loadbalancers. There are loadbalancers which can split read and write traffic for example. Of …

In the MySQL team, we’ve been discussing removing the non-standard \N synonym for NULL. For Example:

mysql> SELECT NULL is \N;
+------------+
| NULL is \N |
+------------+
|          1 |
+------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> INSERT INTO tablea VALUES (3, \N);
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> SELECT * FROM tablea WHERE b IS \N;
+---+------+
| a | b    |
+---+------+
| 3 | NULL |
+---+------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

The use of “\N” in files loaded with LOAD DATA INFILE or created with SELECT INTO OUTFILE will be unaffected by this change and continue to be supported.

The two options we’ve laid out are:

Option #1:

• Add deprecation warnings in MySQL 5.6 and MySQL 5.7
• Remove in MySQL 5.8

Option #2:

• Add deprecation warnings in MySQL …

In the MySQL team, we’ve been discussing removing the non-standard \N synonym for NULL. For Example:

mysql> SELECT NULL is \N;
+------------+
| NULL is \N |
+------------+
|          1 |
+------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> INSERT INTO tablea VALUES (3, \N);
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> SELECT * FROM tablea WHERE b IS \N;
+---+------+
| a | b    |
+---+------+
| 3 | NULL |
+---+------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

The use of “\N” in files loaded with LOAD DATA INFILE or created with SELECT INTO OUTFILE will be unaffected by this change and continue to be supported.

The two options we’ve laid out are:

Option #1:

• Add deprecation warnings in MySQL 5.6 and MySQL 5.7
• Remove in MySQL 5.8

Option #2:

• Add deprecation warnings in MySQL 5.6.
• Remove in MySQL 5.7

…

Last may I wrote about Reestablishing a MySQL Tradition where we used to have shirts just for those who contributed code to MySQL. Unfortunately that tradition was not kept during various transitions. But Antony Curtis

This is Antony Curtis in the original Community Contributor shirt

impressed me at a conference with his shirt and so the Community Team started the process of getting shirts for our contributors. Today I am proud to announce the first shirt has been ordered and in the post to Antony.

So if you have contributed to MySQL, have an OCA on file, AND are going to be at …