This week we talk about NULLs and how to find the right data type.

Events
OSCon will be held Monday Jul 16th through Friday Jul 20th and has a data track. We did a podcast about OSCon, including a discount code!

MySQL Connect will be held in San Francisco on Saturday September 29th and Sunday September 30th. This is a technical conference about MySQL, bringing together MySQL engineers at Oracle and the MySQL Community, and will include sessions about the latest MySQL features and roadmaps. The …

MariaDB announced their 5.3 GA and 5.5 alpha releases.

Oracle will be at DrupalCon in Denver, CO from Monday, March 19th through Friday, March 23rd.

Percona's XtraDB cluster announcement
XtraDB Cluster at the San Francisco MySQL Meetup on Wednesday, March 21st

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There are a lot of events scheduled for the next few months, we are excited about the international scope and the mix of big and small, paid and free events. This week we finish explaining the output of EXPLAIN. Ear candy is sshfs, at the movies is a presentation on joins and subqueries and how to optimize them.

Free OTN MySQL Developer Day, Singapore, Tuesday Feb 21st

Free OTN MySQL Developer Day, Paris, France, Tuesday Feb 21st

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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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Registration for Percona Live: MySQL Conference and Expo is open! The conference is from Tuesday, April 10th through Thursday, April 12th. Early bird pricing ends March 12th, 2012.
Use code PL-pod and save 10% off the early bird prices!.

The 1st Latin American Conference about MySQL, NoSQL and Cloud technologies will be held in Buenos Aires in June. It is called the MariaDB NoSQL & Cloud Latin American Conference and we'll bring you more information as it becomes available.

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I love cool toys, don’t you? Especially when they help me optimize ugly, nasty, evil looking queries :)
I use mk-visual explain to help me understand better what the h*ll is happening on my MySQL servers and how they are being butchered, but today I discovered a small yet neat tool, which I think might have been overlooked. It uses mk-visual-explain, but does it visually, enabling you to open and close sections of the explain tree structure. I’m talking about http://explain.plosquare.com/.

Thank you Jan Ploski

Because Sharing is Caring

When examining the execution plan of troublesome queries in MySQL, most users are aware of using EXPLAIN. However, an often overlooked, yet very helpful extension of EXPLAIN, is EXPLAIN EXTENDED coupled with the SHOW WARNINGS command.

The reason being is because it provides a little more information about how the optimizer processes the query, and thus it could help to quickly identify a problem that you might not otherwise recognize with just EXPLAIN.

For instance, here is a common query which could be inefficient:

SELECT id FROM t WHERE id='1';

And here is the CREATE TABLE output:

mysql> show create table tG
*************************** 1. row …

Here’s a sneak peek at a video matrix — this is all the videos that include Pythian Group employees at the MySQL conference. I hope to have all the rest of the videos processed and uploaded within 24 hours, with a matrix similar to the one below (but of course with many more sessions).

Video for the presentation at the 2009 MySQL Camp:
Chasing Bottlenecks
by Morgan Tocker

Description:
The best way to performance tune a system is to find out what your bottlenecks are, and attacking those first. In the first part of this session, I'll be looking at some of the issues faced with common database workloads. From there, I'll then be showing how you can get more information out of MySQL and your Operating System to find out about your workload. This session is designed for beginner to intermediate MySQL users.

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Video for the presentation at the 2009 MySQL Camp:
Top 10 MySQL Pet Peeves and How to Workaround Them
Jeremy Zawodny

Watch it online here:

Download the 106 Mb .mov file at <

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