I normally do not repost articles and make teeny tiny blog posts (I have noticed a few bloggers who do that, and it bothers me), but I found a short article on TechRepublic called Are tech certs valuable or not? to be quite interesting.

The author did an informal poll of a few CBS interactive higher-ups, and it was interesting to note that in addition to the expected "it depends" and "experience is the most important thing" and "beware the person with many certs and no experience" answers, the MySQL certification was specifically noted as being good:

Doug Lane, Director of Site Reliability and Performance Engineering, says, “The MySQL DBA certifications are valuable to me, since we support so …

I was looking into the history about why SYSDATE() and NOW() behave differently in MySQL, and it looks like in 4.0 and 4.1 they used to be the same. But as of MySQL 5.0, SYSDATE() was changed to emulate Oracle’s behavior, that is, it returns the time as of the function execution, not as of the statement start.

There are a number of bug reports related to this: 15101, 12480, 12481, and 12562.

I am not an Oracle expert. Does NOW() return a constant result within an Oracle query, like NOW() in MySQL does? Or is there no NOW() in Oracle, and you use SYSDATE() instead? Why is Oracle’s SYSDATE() functionality worth emulating? It looks to me like some …

I will be at Zendcon next week with two presentations. What’s New with MySQL will be on Wednesday the 19th and The Care and Feeding of a MySQL Database on Thursday the 20th.

Other MySQL centric session are by Bill Karwin on SQL Injection Myths and Fallacies and MySQL 5.5 InnoDB Tuning. Plus Ligaya Turmelle will present Character Sets Suck.

…

I am looking for a few more unique examples to add to the final chapter of my upcoming book on MySQL Backup & Recovery. If you would like to share your fun experience, receive a mention and a free copy please let me know via comment. If you would like to share but not have your comment published, please note at top of your feedback.

Thanks for helping to contribute to a detailed list of what could go wrong and how to be prepared for a MySQL disaster.

SkySQL today announced rapid growth and success in its first year of operations, fueled by new customers, partnerships and corporate growth. Highlights of the company's first year include:

• Signing more than 160 customers in its first 12 months of operation

• Attracting the attention of leading technology and distribution partners

• Receiving 900,000 Euros from Tekes to fund R&D

“The first year can often make or break a young company,” said Ralf Wahlsten, chairman and investor in SkySQL. “Establishing a name for a startup is often a giant hurdle, especially in this economic climate. But it is one that SkySQL has surpassed, as evidenced by the number of customers, partners, and talented employees that have been attracted to the company. SkySQL’s rapid growth validates the value and quality of expertise that can only be delivered by a company with an innate understanding of what …

Uh, uh… about a year ago Mayflower OpenSource Labs released the mysqlnd user handler plugin (PECL/mysqlnd_uh). The extension lets you extend and replace mysqlnd internal function calls with PHP. Uh, uh… mysqlnd internals exported to user space? Who cares as long as it does the trick?! Let me show you seven lines of PHP code to monitor all queries issued by any PHP MySQL application using any PHP MySQL extension (mysql, mysqli, PDO_MySQL) compiled to use the mysqlnd library.

query_monitor.php

class conn_proxy extends MysqlndUhConnection {
 public function query($res, $query) {
  debug_print_backtrace();
  return parent::query($res, $query);
 }
}
mysqlnd_uh_set_connection_proxy(new conn_proxy());

That’s it. Install PECL/mysqlnd_uh and load the above query_monitor.php before your …

Uh, uh… about a year ago Mayflower OpenSource Labs released the mysqlnd user handler plugin (PECL/mysqlnd_uh). The extension lets you extend and replace mysqlnd internal function calls with PHP. Uh, uh… mysqlnd internals exported to user space? Who cares as long as it does the trick?! Let me show you seven lines of PHP code to monitor all queries issued by any PHP MySQL application using any PHP MySQL extension (mysql, mysqli, PDO_MySQL) compiled to use the mysqlnd library.

query_monitor.php

class conn_proxy extends MysqlndUhConnection {
 public function query($res, $query) {
  debug_print_backtrace();
  return parent::query($res, $query);
 }
}
mysqlnd_uh_set_connection_proxy(new conn_proxy());

That’s it. Install PECL/mysqlnd_uh and load the above query_monitor.php before your …

I'm looking at the schedule for Percona Live UK coming up in 2 weeks from now and realize there's quite a smorgasbord of High Availability talks. What's more interesting, I see that we will be presenting some opposite opinions for the audience to digest:

read more

Starting with MySQL 5.5.16 it is possible to setup a password-less connections from clients into MySQL server using Windows SSPI authentication framework. This functionality is provided by Windows Native Authentication (WNA) plugin distributed with the commercial version of 5.5.16 server. The client-side support for WNA authentication is built into the client library (libmysql) distributed with the community version of 5.5.16 server and requires no additional configuration. Clients which link to 5.5.16 or higher version of libmysql will be able to connect to MySQL accounts using WNA authentication out-of-the box.

For password-less connections to work, server's administrator must install the WNA plugin in the server and create user accounts which use this plugin for authentication. It is also possible to allow connections to existing MySQL accounts via a proxy WNA account. With this setup Windows clients can password-less connect to the …

Starting with MySQL 5.5.16 it is possible to setup a password-less connections from clients into MySQL server using Windows SSPI authentication framework. This functionality is provided by Windows Native Authentication (WNA) plugin distributed with the commercial version of 5.5.16 server. The client-side support for WNA authentication is built into the client library (libmysql) distributed with the community version of 5.5.16 server and requires no additional configuration. Clients which link to 5.5.16 or higher version of libmysql will be able to connect to MySQL accounts using WNA authentication out-of-the box.

For password-less connections to work, server's administrator must install the WNA plugin in the server and create user accounts which use this plugin for authentication. It is also possible to allow connections to existing MySQL accounts via a proxy WNA account. With this setup Windows clients can password-less connect to the …