Read the original article at Best of Guide – Highlights of Our Popular Content

We cherry pick the top 5 most popular posts of various topics we’ve covered in recent months.

• 5 Things Toxic to Scalability

We use a broad brush to highlight the biggest no-nos in web application scalability.

We dig into scalability, steering to the richest areas to focus on.

MySQL on Amazon EC2, the what, how …

Yes, things certainly changes all the time for us IT folks. New classes of hardware, new cool pieces of software and cool gadgets. Stuff that usually gets better and better, and if not, at least they are on the move. Constantly.

If it isn't Ivy Bridge based motherboards, it's "New iPad" (that is a strange name by the way, what is wrong with iPad 3? And it will not be "new" for long) or MySQL 5.6 or Ubuntu 11.10.

And then there are things that don't improve much over time, and still stays around. Sometimes because they have some powerful backers, despite it being pure evil (Adobe Flash anyone), but sometimes because it's so good that you just cannot improve …

Whenever I learn about a new technology, I typically want to know the major administrative touch points more than I want to know exhaustive detail about every configuration option.  Give me the gist, show me enough to get started, and give me a link to the manual.

XtraDB cluster (and Galera, the technology on which it is based) has been attracting a lot of interest in the community and we want to start presenting information about both what we know is essential, but also what we suspect will become essential as more and more production experience is logged with these important new technologies.

As such, I put together a baseline talk for getting you into a working knowledge of XtraDB …

I used to think one should never look at max_binlog_size, however last year I had a couple of interesting cases which showed that sometimes it may be very important variable to tune properly. I meant to write about it earlier but never really had a chance to do it. I have it now!

One of our customers was complaining that the database would lock up at random times and then it would go back to normal in just a few seconds. This was MySQL 5.0 running MyISAM/InnoDB mix, not heavily loaded. We used pt-stalk (at that time it was aspersa stalk) trying to figure out what is happening, however all we found was a spike in writes, many queries piled up and looking at the system process list it was quite obvious that page flush daemon was acting out. I/O Pattern was rather awkward – here is an output from …

Whoa, it was a long time since I posted here! But I have been very busy with non-MySQL related issues lately, so that is an explanation I guess.

This week I decided to try a few MySQL things anyway, the plan was to compare MongoDB with MySQL Cluster as a key-value store. We have some data here at Recorded Future that is currently in MongoDB, it will not fit in DynamoDB (it has secondary indexes for example) and I was thinking that maybe MySQL Cluster was an alternative, it was some time ago since I tried Cluster anyway.

At Recorded Future, we run everything on Amazon EC2, but I was thinking that this benchmark should be about another thing than just comparing MySQL Cluster with MongoDB, I wanted to see the difference between EC2 and some hard iron.

So, I started downloading some data to my recently constructed Linux server box. This server is a home brew machine housed in a Chieftech 4U …

A question came up today about how to stripe a MySQL view, and this post shows you how. Along with the question, there was a complaint about why you can’t use session variables in a view definition. It’s important to note two things: there’s a workaround and there’s an outstanding request to add lift the feature limitation in Bug 18433.

A striped view lets authorized users see only part of a table, and is how Oracle Database 11g sets up Virtual Private Databases. Oracle provides both schema (or database) level access and fine-grained control access. Fine grained control involves setting a special session variable during a user’s login. This is typically done by checking the rights in an Access …

There’s a lot of great new features in MySQL 5.6 DMRs – almost too many to keep track of.  And while a lot of (justified) attention is given to the headline-grabbing features of 5.6 (memcached APIs! global transaction ids! improved PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA!), I’m often curious about the new features that don’t make as big a splash.  I thought I would look at one such new feature – WorkLog #5217.  I’m not telling you what this WorkLog is yet; test your knowledge of 5.6 features by seeing if you can figure it out from the following scenario.  Imagine the following table data:

mysql> SELECT * FROM p;
+------+------+
| a    | b    |
+------+------+
|    1 |    1 |
|   11 |    1 |
|   21 |    1 |
+------+------+
3 rows in set (0.00 sec)

OK, try to write an UPDATE statement that increments b for the row where a = 11.  Easy, right?

UPDATE p SET b = b+1 WHERE a = 11;

OK, now do it without a …

I’m pleased to announce a variety of prize winners associated with the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo 2012. The following people won prizes in the pre-conference registration promotion:

Kindle Fire Winners:

Tatiana B., Etsy, United States
Tom H., Cloudtree, United States
Loren A., HearSayCorp, United States

High Performance MySQL 3rd Edition Book Winners:

Marcus O., Discover Books Ltd., Canada
Steven P., Paciolan, United States

We also held a prize drawing for those who completed the post-conference survey:

Kindle Fire Winner:

Norman M., FlipKey, United States

$50 Amazon Gift Certificate …

A big thanks goes out to everyone involved with the MySQL Connect Content Committee. We had a great response to the call for papers and realize that it took a considerable amount of time and effort to review the submitted sessions and BOFs. While Oracle employees aided with this effort, the MySQL Community deserves to be acknowledged for the time they took out of their busy schedules to help with our conference. Their input was invaluable to the support of the MySQL Community. Continued support such as this from the community is another reason that MySQL continues to be #1 open source database. We'll keep you posted as we finalize and publish the sessions, BoFs and HOLs for MySQL Connect.

Thanks to the following committee members:

MySQL Community:

• Ronald …

A recent question on a mailing list was the best practices for UTF-8 and PHP/MySQL. The following are the configurations I used in my multi-language projects.

MySQL UTF-8 Configuration

# my.cnf
[mysqld]
default_character_set = utf8
character_set_client       = utf8
character_set_server       = utf8
[client]
default_character_set = utf8

PHP UTF-8 Configuration

#php.ini
default_charset = "utf-8"

Apache UTF-8 Configuration

#httpd.conf
AddDefaultCharset UTF-8
<VirtualHost>
    AddCharset UTF-8   .htm
</VirtualHost>

HTML file UTF-8 Configuration

 <meta charset="utf-8">

PHP file UTF-8 Configuration

header('Content-type: text/html; charset=UTF-8');

MySQL connection (extra precaution)

SET NAMES utf8;

Shell UTF-8

And last but not least, even editing files in shell can be affected (.e.g UTF-8 data to be …