Character sets are like the force: they surround us and penetrate us, binding all our digital world together. A character set is how we convert the 1’s and 0’s that the computer understands into human-readable characters like ABC. In one of the first character sets, ASCII, the number 97 is translated to “a” and 63 is the question mark (?).

“Are there other languages besides English?”
“Don’t think so, Bob.”

English-Only Please

The trouble with ASCII is that it was created back in the ‘60s by a bunch of Americans and they were not thinking about French or German, they were thinking about English. Guess what? ASCII works great for American English, but there’s no way it can encode even Spanish, let alone something like Chinese, so it only met the needs of around 5% of the world …

One day, after taking a job using MySQL, I was writing a query quietly at my desk. It was around quittin’ time, and I was whipping up a new report on the monthly sales figures that the CEO needed for his board meeting in the morning. I, in my ignorance, wrote a nice query with a simple little sum() function. What I did not realize is this caused all my rows to sum up to one row when it really should’ve show several rows. This made my report completely inaccurate. Blindly trusting me as I had blindly trusted MySQL, the CEO presented my report to the board who decided that the company was grossly unprofitable and voted to shut it down. Only when I was waiting in the bread line at my local workhouse did I realize my mistake.

That’s me in the bowler.

Okay, so that’s totally made up. Mostly. I caught the error …

Going to MySQL Connect was truly a blast. We got a lot of good questions and feedback in the sessions and there were a lot of interest in both MySQL Fabric and the MySQL Applier for Hadoop.

A big thank you to all that attended the talks, I got a lot of good questions and comments that will help us build good solutions.

The talks are available on SlideShare:

• MySQL Sharding: Tools and Best Practices for Horizontal Scaling 
• MySQL Applier for Apache Hadoop: Real-Time Event Streaming to HDFS
• Sharding PHP with MySQL …

The “Too many connections” problem is a common issue with applications using excessive permissions (and those that grant said global permissions). MySQL will always grant a user with SUPER privileges access to a DB to investigate the problem with a SHOW PROCESSLIST and where you can check the limits. I however found the following.

mysql> show global variables like 'max_connections';
+-----------------+-------+
| Variable_name   | Value |
+-----------------+-------+
| max_connections | 2000  |
+-----------------+-------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> show global status like 'max%';
+----------------------+-------+
| Variable_name        | Value |
+----------------------+-------+
| Max_used_connections | 6637  |
+----------------------+-------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

How can the max_used_connection exceed max_connections? This is possible because you can dynamically change max_connections in a normal MySQL environment. However …

The 3rd season of MySQL Marinate begins October 1st! Join the meetup group and RSVP at season 3 to join! You can do the work on MySQL, or if you prefer, MariaDB or Percona.

If you do not have the book yet, you can still do the first week by using the online material from Browse Contents on the OReilly book page for Learning MySQL. There is homework for week 1, see the master list for all the information.

If you would like to learn MySQL from the ground up, consider joining us. This is for beginners If you have no experience with MySQL, or if you are a developer that wants to learn …

I had to laugh (just a bit) at this on the exhibitor floor at Oracle Open World 2013. There was a large MongoDB presence at the Slot 301. There are a few reasons.
First, the identity crisis remains. There is no MongoDB in the list of exhibitors, it’s 10gen, but where is the 10gen representation in the sign. 99.99% of attendees would not know this.
Second, the first and only slide I saw (as shown below), tries to directly compare implementing a solution to Oracle. The speaker made some comment but I really zoned out quickly. Having worked with MongoDB, even on one of my own projects, contemplated the ROI of being proficient in this for consulting, even discussing at length with the CEO and CTO, and hearing only issues with MongoDB with existing MySQL clients, I have come to the conclusion that MongoDB is a niche product. It’s …

I’ve got a new article, which is part of a new three-part series, on moving data between SQL and Hadoop, both the export to Hadoop and importing processed content back into an SQL store.

In this first one, we look at the basic mechanics and considerations before you start the migration of data, such as the data format, content, and export techniques.

Read: SQL to Hadoop and back again, Part 1: Basic data interchange techniques

Brian Aker gives the “zinger” lightning talk about the newly announced “Drizzle”. This short (under 8 minutes) video captures Aker’s highlights of why he started the Drizzle project and how Drizzle is different from MySQL — both in what has been removed from MySQL and what features Drizzle can accomodate.

Play the video directly in your browser at http://technocation.org/node/576/play or download the 116 Mb file at http://technocation.org/node/576/download.

Brian Aker gives the “zinger” lightning talk about the newly announced “Drizzle”. This short (under 8 minutes) video captures Aker’s highlights of why he started the Drizzle project and how Drizzle is different from MySQL — both in what has been removed from MySQL and what features Drizzle can accomodate.

…

I am about to give a talk at MySQL Connect about what you need to know before upgrading to MySQL 5.6.

The PDF slides are online at http://bit.ly/upgrade56. I will be posting a video in the next few weeks!

As you saw on the keynote, we are introducing an integrated framework for managing farms of MySQL servers with support for both high-availability and sharding. It should be noted that this is a very early alpha and that it at this point is not ready for production use.

MySQL Fabric is an integrated system for managing a collection of MySQL servers and is the framework on which high-availability and sharding is built. MySQL Fabric is open-source and is intended to be extensible, easy to use, and support procedure execution even in the presence of failure, an execution model we call resilient execution.

To ensure high-availability, it is necessary to have redundancy in the system. For database systems, the redundancy traditionally takes the form of having a primary server acting as a master and using replication to keep secondaries available to take over in case the primary fails. This means that the "server" …