In a recent post we showed you how to migrate a SQL Server database to MySQL. There, we used the oficial Microsoft ODBC driver and that’s OK if you are running MySQL Workbench in Windows. But what if your desktop OS is some Linux variant or Mac OS X?

It turns out that Microsoft has recently released an ODBC driver for Linux. However, you can’t use this driver with MySQL Workbench for Linux. (Actually you can, but you would have to rebuild Workbench). The main reason is that this ODBC driver was linked against unixODBC (an ODBC driver manager), while Workbench uses another ODBC driver manager: iODBC and the two of them can’t coexist in the same system.

So for Linux …

From time to time some maintenance work on the MySQL database has to be done. During the maintenance window we do not want to have application traffic on the database.

Sometimes it is hard to shut down all applications spread over the whole company. Or we want to allow only some specific hosts to access mysql from remote (for example the monitoring system or the backup server).

For this purpose we can use the Linux packet filtering.

To see what packet filtering rules are available we can run the following command:

iptables -L INPUT -v

To close the MySQL port on all interfaces we use:

iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport mysql -j DROP

and to open the MySQL port again after the maintenance window:

iptables -D INPUT -p tcp --dport mysql -j DROP

Hema, Sanjay's slides are at https://stbeehive.oracle.com/content/dav/st/MC/Documents/MEB%20Best%20PracticesDraft1.pdf, but this link is not accessible for public!

Percona CEO Peter Zaitsev leads a track at the inaugural Percona MySQL University event in Raleigh, N.C. on Jan. 29, 2013.

Following our events in Raleigh, Montevideo, Buenos Aires, Percona MySQL University comes to Toronto on March 22nd.

This is going to our most dense event yet, absolutely packed with information. Even though we have just 1 track we have 12 talks and 11 speakers. We had unique opportunity this time because Percona’s Consulting, Support, RemoteDBA, Training team are having internal meeting at the start of the week so we had many speakers available.

Specifically the MySQL High Availability, Replication, Clustering are getting a lot of coverage.

Special …

Really Large Queries: Advanced Optimization Techniques: Wednesday, February 27, 2013 10 a.m. PST

Do you have a query you never dared to touch?
Do you know it’s bad, but it’s needed?
Does it fit your screen?
Does it really have to be that expensive?
Do you want to do something about it?

During the next Percona webinar on February 27, I will present some techniques that can be useful when troubleshooting such queries. We will go through case studies (each case study is made from multiple real-world cases). In these cases we were often able to reduce query execution time from 10s of seconds to a fraction of a …

There have been number reports/benchmarks showing MySQL 5.6 to be slower than MySQL 5.5 on variety of workloads. There are many possible reasons and I believe we will learn about many of them in the next few weeks and months as MySQL 5.6 is starting to get production battle tested and there is inflow of real world production performance data hitting MySQL Support Team at Oracle. For number of Simple workloads I would expect to see some slowdown – MySQL 5.6 Optimizer got a lot smarter and the more plans have to be considered for the query the more time the query optimization is likely to take. I also would expect newer code to benefit from “polishing” and clean up to achieve the best performance possible. At Percona we surely will be doing fine tuning for our Percona Server 5.6 release.

Another thing to remember about MySQL 5.6 is – it comes with …

SkySQL and Monty Program are on the road with our joint Meetup in Amsterdam where Monty Widenius - the origninal creator of MySQL - will unveil his vision of the future of the MySQL database via MariaDB.

Seppo Jaakola from Codership will give a presentation about Galera Cluster for MySQL and MariaDB.

In addition we will have speakers from Booking.com as well as Anders Karlsson from SkySQL who will talk about Big Data.

read more

What better time to start learning about the world's most popular open-source database - now that MySQL 5.6 has been released. With its increased performance, scalability, reliability and manageability, MySQL 5.6 helps users meet the most demanding Web, Cloud and embedded application requirements.

Virtual Developer's Day for MySQL

The first Virtual Developer Day for MySQL will take place on March 12 at 9:00 a.m. US, Pacific Time. The event will include presentations and hands-on labs to educate MySQL users on essential skills and the latest features in MySQL 5.6. Register  here.

MySQL for Beginners Training

In the MySQL for Beginners …

During the last year, I was asked a number of times when/if MariaDB will support identifying dynamic columns by names instead of numbers. I am happy to say that named Dynamic Columns feature is in MariaDB 10.0.1 release. Now, after some literary effort, here is updated documentation: Dynamic Columns in MariaDB.