We are very honoured to have been asked to give a “state of the MySQL” keynote presentation at the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo in April.

While this will not be in any way an official “state of the dolphin” presentation, I think it is fitting given the expansion of the MySQL ecosystem that the Percona Live event includes an independent perspective on the state of MySQL. The full title of the presentation – MySQL, YourSQL, NoSQL, NewSQL – the state of the MySQL ecosystem – reflects that.

We want to present an independent perspective on the health of the MySQL ecosystem in 2013, drawing on our research and analysis, as well as the views of the participants in that ecosystem.

You have …

I enjoyed being able to add metadata to a connection in Microsoft SQL Server. I’d annotate my connections so that a DBA could learn a little bit by inspecting it. For example, what was its purpose, and from which application did it originate? The employer where I did this wasn’t perfect at managing their database user accounts and so forth, and there were many servers with hundreds of databases on each server, so this was a good way to provide some extra hints.

That hasn’t historically been available in MySQL, but with MySQL 5.6, it will be. This is a nice addition. I assume the support for it in the connector libraries will grow over time.

I used to emulate this feature in client-side code. That …

I enjoyed being able to add metadata to a connection in Microsoft SQL Server. I’d annotate my connections so that a DBA could learn a little bit by inspecting it. For example, what was its purpose, and from which application did it originate? The employer where I did this wasn’t perfect at managing their database user accounts and so forth, and there were many servers with hundreds of databases on each server, so this was a good way to provide some extra hints.

When I heard that MySQL 5.6 was implementing EXPLAIN for writes (INSERT,UPDATE,DELETE,REPLACE), I was pretty excited. Then I heard that MySQL 5.6 also was implementing a JSON format for EXPLAIN and my thought was “I do not care about that!”

Boy, was I wrong. The JSON format does not just put the output into JSON format, it also gives extra information that’s actually pretty useful! It can tell you when you are doing an implicit cast, which parts of a composite index are being used, and when index condition pushdown are being used. None of these are shown in regular EXPLAIN (which seems odd, why could they extend the JSON format but not put the information into the regular EXPLAIN format?), so using the JSON format is actually a good idea even if you do not care about what format your output is in.

As a note, MySQL Workbench’s Visual Explain (go to Query->Visual Explain Current Statement) also gives this information.

Kihon (基本, きほん?) is a Japanese term meaning “basics” or “fundamentals.” The term is used to refer to the basic techniques that are taught and practiced as the foundation of most Japanese martial arts. — Wikipedia

A new year and a new look at the basics of MySQL. Before I was a MySQL Community Manager and started traveling too much, I loved studying martial arts. The instructors in Japanese martial arts stress Kihon as you have to be able to do the basic actions at a high level or the advanced actions will simply not work. Oh, and by the way, most the advanced stuff is made of up the basic stuff. Each new year would start with practices emphasizing Kihon. So with a new year, I would like to start a series of blog postings on MySQL basics.

MySQL is a relational database that has a community edition that is free and runs on a variety of platforms (binaries for Windows, Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, MacOS, and …

I’m pleased to announce the first of the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo 2013 keynote speakers and new sponsors including Amazon Web Services, Google, Clustrix, Scalebase, PalominoDB, Database Trends & Applications, and Linux Journal. We are also now accepting applications for the DotOrg Pavilion. Also, nominations are now being accepted for the 2013 MySQL Community Awards which will be given during the conference Community Networking Reception.

The 2012 Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo featured sponsorship and speakers from some of the world’s most admired brands and was enthusiastically received by more than 1,000 attendees, many of whom praised the breadth and caliber of the sessions. The conference was so popular that we added a fourth …

Installing Nginx With PHP5 (And PHP-FPM) And MySQL Support On Fedora 18

Nginx (pronounced "engine x") is a free, open-source, high-performance HTTP server. Nginx is known for its stability, rich feature set, simple configuration, and low resource consumption. This tutorial shows how you can install Nginx on a Fedora 18 server with PHP5 support (through PHP-FPM) and MySQL support.

Ubuntu does not provide an apt-get repository package for MySQL 5.5 on this older OS, however this is still a widely used long term support version. The following steps will upgrade an existing MySQL 5.1 apt-get version to a standard MySQL 5.5 binary.

Step 1. Remove existing MySQL 5.1 retaining data and configuration

sudo su -
service mysql stop
cp -r /etc/mysql /etc/mysql.51
cp -r /var/lib/mysql /var/lib/mysql.51
which mysqld
dpkg -P mysql-server mysql-server-5.1 mysql-server-core-5.1
which mysqld
which mysql
dpkg -P mysql-client-5.1 mysql-client-core-5.1
which mysql
dpkg -P libdbd-mysql-perl libmysqlclient16 mysql-common
# This will not remove /etc/mysql if any other files are in the directory
dpkg -l | grep mysql
[ -d /etc/mysql ] && mv /etc/mysql /etc/mysql.uninstall
cp -r /etc/mysql.51 /etc/mysql

2. Prepare configuration and required directories.

sudo su -
MYCNF="/etc/mysql/my.cnf"
grep basedir ${MYCNF}
sed -ie …

DataStax and VoltDB launch their version 3.0s. And more

For 451 Research clients: DataStax adds security and manageability to distributed NoSQL database bit.ly/Vb1IiT

— Matt Aslett (@maslett) January 18, 2013

For 451 clients: LogiXML serves up fresh cut of BI stack with an eye to more embedded analytics deals bit.ly/SppzsH By Krishna Roy

— Matt Aslett (@maslett) January 21, 2013

Inside H-P’s Missed Chance To Avoid a Disastrous Deal – WSJ.com on.wsj.com/Td7wrh via @wsj …

University of Montreal Tracks Genomic Data With Tokutek’s TokuDB.

Faster insertion rates, improved scalability and agility support lab’s fast growing research database as it grows from 100s of GBs to 1 TB and beyond.

Issue addressed: MySQL database used for genomic research must be able to quickly ingest huge amounts of incoming data – hundreds of thousands of records every day. It also must be able to retrieve data quickly in response to a diverse set of research requests.

Enabling the Hunt for New Cures for Diseases by Seamlessly Processing Billions of Mutations in Epidemiology Records

The Organization: The The Philip Awadalla Laboratory is the Medical and …