Registration for Percona Live: MySQL Conference and Expo is open! The conference is from Tuesday, April 10th through Thursday, April 12th at the Santa Clara, CA convention center. Early bird pricing ends March 12th, 2012.
Use code PL-pod and save 10% off the early bird prices!. Check out the tutorial and session schedule!

SkySQL and MariaDB Solutions Day on Friday, April 13th, 2012 in Santa Clara, CA.

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Good books on databases are rare. So permit me to step out of my normal MySQL-centric role and review a new book that is very good and covers a lot of generic relational database territory while also teaching the basics of Oracle 11g. I would estimate that 10% of the book is 11g and the rest would be valuable to new DBAs of other database systems. Besides, seeing how other databases perform some tasks differently may spur you to improve your own.

OCA Oracle Database 11g: SQL Fundamentals I: A real-world Certification Guide
Author: Steve Reis

Database books are hard to write. Databases are not warm, easy to understand and the many concepts can require a student on the subject to concentrate on many obtuse factors all at one time. Presenting the material in a clear and concise fashion can be hard. Providing examples that show the various concepts without being silly or obtuse is harder. And keeping the book readable …

An annual tradition of the upcoming MySQL user conference is the awards ceremony. Last year we introduced the opportunity for everyone in the community to nominate candidates and this was a big success. Now is the time to start nominating deserving winners for the awards for 2012, in the 3 categories named below.

The winners will be selected by a community panel (see below) and winners will be announced on Wednesday, April 11th at the Santa Clara Convention Center, as part of the evening Community Reception.

How:

Please send in your suggestions for deserving winners
to: mysql.awards@gmail.com
no later than: 23:59 Sunday February 29th (Pacific time)

…

Database blogging is more than about announcing that your last night’s backup was successful. While that’s extremely important to keep track of, the database world across Oracle, MySQL, and SQL Server technologies has grown way beyond. This Log Buffer Edition also extends beyond and more in this Log Buffer #258. Oracle: Laimis has produced a [...]

I published an SQLite3 storage back-end to NIST::NVD on the CPAN. It’s pretty quick. About as fast as the DB_File one, but without the down side of being tied to DB_File. It shouldn’t be too difficult to re-factor this code to any DBI-based database. MariaDB anyone?

I know it works on Debian. The nightly CPAN test results should come back shortly and I’ll find out how well it works on other platforms.

I was searching around and was pleasantly surprised when I ran across this new MySQL Troubleshooting book by Sveta Smirnova:

“MySQL Troubleshooting – What To Do When Queries Don’t Work”

http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920021964.do

Having worked with Sveta in Support for years, I’m certain this book is chock-full of great troubleshooting techniques and advices (and you can get a good idea from the “Table of Contents” listed on the above page).

I’m always happy to see new MySQL-related books.

Congratulations, Sveta!

Here's a question that was driving me crazy: Why do these two explain plans look different?

explain select a from test order by b;
+----+-------------+-------+-------+---------------+------+---------+------+---------+-------------+
| id | select_type | table | type  | possible_keys | key  | key_len | ref  | rows    | Extra       |
+----+-------------+-------+-------+---------------+------+---------+------+---------+-------------+
|  1 | SIMPLE      | test  | index | NULL          | b    | 5       | NULL | 3263769 | Using index |
+----+-------------+-------+-------+---------------+------+---------+------+---------+-------------+

and this

explain select a,c from test order by b;
+----+-------------+-------+------+---------------+------+---------+------+---------+----------------+
| id | select_type | table | type | possible_keys | key  | key_len | ref  | rows    | Extra          | …

At yesterdays MySQL Tech Tour in Dallas, a gentleman asked how to not only partition data but also store the indexes on other disks as a way of reducing I/O contention on drives.That struck a chord with me and I was soon looking up the information in the MySQL manual. I remembered there was a way to do this with MySQL 5.6 but I am sure the small screen of my cell phone and the detail level of the documentation did not convery the information as well as I had wished.

The example I tried to show was from the subpartition section of the MySQL manual. If you read 12.1.17 for the CREATE TABLE syntax, you will see how to add DATA DIRECTORY and INDEX DIRECTORY definitions to a partition. I guess the example I remembered got stuck in my brain cache (such as it is) because 5.6 allows subpartitioning. This allows you to store a column in a partition …

I recently came across a dev VM running MySQL 5.0.77 (an old release, 28 January 2009) that didn’t have InnoDB available. skip-innodb wasn’t set, SHOW VARIABLES LIKE '%innodb%' looked as expected, but with one exception: the value of have-innodb was DISABLED.

I confirmed this with SHOW ENGINES:

(root@localhost) [(none)]> show engines;
+------------+----------+----------------------------------------------------------------+
| Engine     | Support  | Comment                                                        |
+------------+----------+----------------------------------------------------------------+
| MyISAM     | DEFAULT  | Default engine as of MySQL 3.23 with great performance         |
| MEMORY     | YES      | Hash based, stored in memory, useful for temporary tables      |
| InnoDB     | DISABLED | Supports transactions, row-level locking, and …

The Oracle Linux and Virtualization Documentation Team is seeking an experienced Technical Writer
with a focus on writing documentation for the Oracle Linux product. (The MySQL Documentation Team is part of that group as well.)

Applicants should be located in either Ireland, the UK, Sweden, Norway, …