Whenever I start a new project with MySQL or MariaDB I am tempted to jump in and start creating my schema and tables with nothing more than a basic outline of the requirements. Often the justification I give myself is that the sooner I have something up and running, the better off I'll be, and besides, there will be plenty of time to sort things out later. Even when I am absolutely sure my ad-hoc schema is only for "development purposes" and will "never ever be used in production" it often is.

A lot of grief can be avoided if time is taken right at the start, before any tables are defined, to plan. This is big picture time and every stakeholder, from IT to the developers to management and even to marketing, needs to be involved. If for no other reason than to set expectations.

Right at the start, everyone involved in the project needs to know that there is no perfect data definition, and no one …

One issue that developers often run into is needing or wanting to run a development version of MariaDB or MySQL on their desktop when there is already a production version installed. You may want to try out a new feature, or experiment with a patch, or maybe you're developing a new storage engine, or just having fun hacking on the code. Whatever the reason, when this happens to me I often want to be able to run the non-standard version without replacing my currently installed version.

Fortunately, the process for doing so is easy. The instructions below are adapted from the Running MariaDB from the source directory article in the AskMonty Knowledgebase.

Before beginning, make sure you shut down your running instance of mysqld before starting your test instance. It is possible to run multiple mysqlds on the same server, but doing so is …

Join me for a webinar where I discuss how the recent changes and trends in big data management effect the enterprise.  This event is sponsored by Red Rock and RockSolid.

Overview:

It is an exciting and interesting time to be involved in data. More change of influence has occurred in the database management in the last 18 months than has occurred in the last 18 years. New technologies such as NoSQL & Hadoop and radical redesigns of existing technologies, like NewSQL , will change dramatically how we manage data moving forward. 

These technologies bring with them possibilities both in terms of the scale of data retained but also in how this data can be utilized as an information asset. The ability to leverage Big Data to drive …

Red Hat’s $136m acquisition of open source storage vendor Gluster marks Red Hat’s biggest buy since JBoss and starts the fourth quarter with a very intersting deal. The acquisition is definitely good for Red Hat since it bolsters its Cloud Forms IaaS and OpenShift PaaS technology and strategy with storage, which is often the starting point for enterprise and service provider cloud computing deployments. The acquisition also gives Red Hat another weapon in its fight against VMware, Microsoft and others, including OpenStack, of which Gluster is a member (more on that further down). The deal is also good for Gluster given the sizeable price Red Hat is paying for the provider of open source, software-based, scale-out storage for unstructured data and also as validation of both open source and software in today’s IT and cloud computing storage.

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This year’s Surge conference was a great sophomore event to follow up last year’s inaugural conference. A lot of very smart people were there, and the hallway track was great. I presented on three things: a lightning talk about causes of MySQL downtime; I chaired a panel on Big Data and the Cloud; and I showed how to derive scalability and performance metrics from TCP traffic. I’ve sent my slides to the Surge organizers, and I understand that they will be posting them as well as integrating them into the video of my session.

The Case for Global Transaction Identifiers

"Global Transaction Identifiers" is a feature that has been requested every now and then. And it is not so much about what it actually is, but rather about what it enables MySQL users to do. Having a logical identifier associated with each transaction instead of a physical one (filename + offset), provides more flexibility and removes the burden of complex math from userland scripts. We have put out there an early access release (based on 5.6 codebase) of our ongoing effort to implement the global transaction identifiers and we would like some early feedback. Keep in mind that this is NOT something to use in production as it is in very early development stages. That said...

What exactly is a global transaction identifier?

A global identifier is a tag that pin-points a set of changes resulting from the execution of a transaction.

Why do we need …

A common error in SQL is with quotes. Luckily, compared to other databases, MariaDB and MySQL are very forgiving.

For example, suppose I have a "products" table for an online store. If I want to look up every product which has a price of 5.99 or more I might use the following query:

MariaDB [crashcourse]> select prod_id, prod_name, prod_price from products
    -> where prod_price >= 5.99;
+---------+----------------+------------+
| prod_id | prod_name      | prod_price |
+---------+----------------+------------+
| ANV01   | .5 ton anvil   |       5.99 |
| ANV02   | 1 ton anvil    |       9.99 |
| ANV03   | 2 ton anvil    |      14.99 |
| OL1     | Oil can        |       8.99 |
| TNT2    | TNT (5 sticks) |      10.00 |
| FB      | Bird seed      |      10.00 |
| SAFE    | Safe           |      50.00 |
| DTNTR   | Detonator      |      13.00 |
| JP1000  | JetPack 1000   |      35.00 |
| JP2000  | JetPack 2000   |      55.00 | …

Last night at the Oracle OpenWorld MySQL Community Reception, there were lots of old and new friends milling about.  It occurred to me that there is one very important thing Oracle has NOT changed about the MySQL world - the rock stars and higher-ups are still readily accessible.

One of the things I love about being in the open source community is that you can have an in-depth conversation with someone, and only later on find out that this person is famous.  For the most part, rock stars and important people are readily accessible.  They stay in the same hotels that attendees do, they take the same elevators, they are not whisked away by bodyguards, and they do not play the "don't you know who I am?" card.

Now, it's not surprising that the community rock stars like Mark Callaghan, Baron Schwartz, Giuseppe Maxia and Sarah Novotny are still as accessible as ever.  However, Ed Screven and Thomas Ulin were also …

Recently I faced an interesting challenge: modify over 26k views on a single mysqld instance. Altering the view one by one was far from an easy task, so a I had to look for an efficient way to do it. Read to find out more. Preface: Views have security context and their own access control. […]

For those who missed my presentations at Oracle OpenWorld (or if you caught it but want the slides) - PDF slide decks are online:

Securing MySQL (IOUG)  - http://technocation.org/files/doc/MySQLSecurity2011_09.pdf

How to Be a Rockstar MySQL DBA - http://technocation.org/files/doc/2011_09_RockStar.pdf