MySQL 5.6 has arrived to a lot of positive press. The praise is deserved as there many great features and performance improvements. There have also been a few benchmark results from MariaDB and Percona that report performance regressions and now there is a lot of confusion. The confusion occurs because the result differences have not been explained. I think performance benchmarks can be extremely useful as long as the results can be explained. The corollary of this is that benchmark results are less likely to be useful the …

MySQL 5.6 has arrived to a lot of positive press. The praise is deserved as there many great features and performance improvements. There have also been a few benchmark results from MariaDB and Percona that report performance regressions and now there is a lot of confusion. The confusion occurs because the result differences have not been explained. I think performance benchmarks can be extremely useful as long as the results can be explained. The corollary of this is that benchmark results are less likely to be useful the more …

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

Lighttpd is a secure, fast, standards-compliant web server designed for speed-critical environments. This tutorial shows how you can install Lighttpd on a Fedora 18 server with PHP5 support (through PHP-FPM) and MySQL support. PHP-FPM (FastCGI Process Manager) is an alternative PHP FastCGI implementation with some additional features useful for sites of any size, especially busier sites. I use PHP-FPM in this tutorial instead of Lighttpd's spawn-fcgi.

This article is the third in a series on data fabric design and introduces the fabric connector service design pattern.  The previous article in this series introduced the transactional data service design pattern, which defines individual data stores and is the building block for data fabrics based on SQL databases.  The fabric connector builds on transactional data services and is another basic building block of fabric architecture.

Description and Responsibilities
Fabric connectors make a collection of DBMS servers look like a single server.  The fabric connector presents what appears to be a data service API to applications.  It routes each request to an appropriate physical …

MySQL 5.6 has introduced a set of new features related to security (default randomised root password at install, password Validation Plugin …). MySQL now also provides a method for storing authentication credentials securely in an option file named .mylogin.cnf. This new feature has been introduced to avoid exposing password when running MySQL scripts. Its behaviour [...]

On February 28 at 1pm EST I’ll be taking part in a webinar, sponsored by ScaleBase, on strategies for scaling MySQL.

Scalability is one of the primary drivers we’ve seen for database users considering alternatives to traditional relational databases. That could mean adopting an entirely new database for new projects or – more likely for existing applications – looking at various strategies for improving the scalability of an existing database.

During the webinar I will be joined by Doron Levari and Paul Campaniello, both from ScaleBase, which enables applications to scale without disruption to the existing infrastructure. We’ll be discussing, amongst other things:

• Scaling-out your MySQL databases
• New high availability strategies
• Centrally managing a …

There are great features in MySQL 5.6. But not only that. We also tried to correct some old behaviors and limitations which, over the years, have shown to irritate our Community. The behavior of TIMESTAMP columns is one of them.

My colleague Martin Hansson did most of the work and summarized it well in his blog. Thanks to him, since MySQL 5.6.5, it's possible to declare more than one TIMESTAMP column with the DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP or ON UPDATE CURRENT_TIMESTAMP attributes. And it's possible to have DATETIME columns with such attributes. Two limitations lifted!

But that is not the end of the story. TIMESTAMP was still special. Unlike other datatypes, if not declared with the NULL or NOT NULL attributes, it would automatically get NOT NULL. And the first TIMESTAMP column of the table would automatically …

I am very excited and thrilled to use the latest release of MySQL 5.6 in production. This is probably the most notable and innovative release in many years, if not ever.

During the last year, we had the chance to work with many new features and test the fixes to old issues. To be honest, I was expecting to have MySQL 5.6 GA before now, and I even wagered with my colleague Francisco that it would be out before the end of 2012. It was nothing special, just a beer in the Santa Clara Hyatt lounge. Unfortunately for me, MySQL 5.6 is now in GA and given that it happened in 2013, I lost the bet and now have to pay for that beer. But I have also lost the full list of things that we saw as relevant, interesting, or really innovative for MySQL.

So I took a step back, took some time, and reviewed what Oracle delivered in this new MySQL release.

Short premise

Oracle developer teams did great work for …

 FOSDEM 2013

During the weekend of Feb 2-3, 2013, the 13th edition of FOSDEM (Free Open-Source Developers' European Meeting) took place in Brussels, Belgium. This free event organized by volunteers brought together more than 7000 attendees from the open source community, which was much more than expected. It was located in the ULB Campus in several buildings covering about 488 sessions with a mix of keynotes, lightning talks, exams and developer rooms talks.

Both days were very busy on both places - MySQL stand and on Sunday also at MySQL & Friends developer room. We shared time on the stand with Lars Thalmann, Sveta Smirnova and Luis Soares - all had also very nice presentations at MySQL & Friends Developer room on Sunday, Feb 3rd. All 16 MySQL & Friends devroom sessions and its slides are or will be available at Fosdem …

Analyzing SQL Queries with Percona Toolkit, Feb. 25-28, 9-11 a.m. PST

Next week I’m teaching an online Percona Training class, called Analyzing SQL Queries with Percona Toolkit.  This is a guided tour of best practices for pt-query-digest, the best tool for evaluating where your database response time is being spent.

This month we saw the GA release of MySQL 5.6, and I wanted to check if any improvement has been made to the slow query log in table format.  Users of some MySQL appliances like Amazon RDS must use table logs, since they can’t access the file-based logs on the server.

I read the logging …