1. Percona Toolkit
Percona Toolkit (aka Maatkit and Aspersa) is must have collection of advanced command-line tools which helps in performing tasks that are too difficult or complex to perform manually.

2. Mydumper
Mydumper is a high-performance multi-threaded backup/restore tool for MySQL. It’s up to 10x faster compared to mysqldump, can take consistent snapshots and provides File compression on-the-fly. Though it’s still under active development but is well tested/used in production on some large installations.

3. MySQL Master HA
This tool helps to maintain your Master-Slave replication setup. A primary objective is automating master fail-over and slave …

We’re quite happy that we’ve released four major releases that are production ready (better known as generally available or GA in the MySQL world) in the last 26 months. That is just a little over two years, and a whole lot of features. In that same time, MySQL has seen one GA release (MySQL 5.5) and we’re all eagerly awaiting the upcoming MySQL 5.6.

You’ll note that we built MariaDB 5.1, 5.2, and 5.3 based on the MySQL 5.1 codebase. A significant number of features went into MariaDB 5.3 (our biggest GA release to date), with the biggest changes in the optimizer in over a decade. There were also many replication based …

I have a friend who is fond of telling a story from way back in November 2008 at the OpenSQL camp in Charlottesville, Virgina. This was relatively shortly after we had announced to the public that we’d started something called Drizzle (we did that at OSCON) and was even closer to the date I started working on Drizzle full time (which was November 1st). Compared to what it is now, the Drizzle code base was in its infancy. One of the things we hadn’t yet sorted out was the rewrite of the replication code.

So, I had my laptop plugged into a projector, and somebody suggested opening up some random source file… so I did. It was a bit of the replication code that we’d inherited from MySQL. Immediately we spotted a bug. In fact, between myself and Brian I think we worked out that none of the error …

This week we talk about numeric data types in MySQL.

News/Events/Feedback
OurSQL Listener Jesper Hansen was nice enough to take a screen shot of episode 0 of the ourSQL podcast hitting 12,345 downloads.

Conferences:
MySQL Innovation Day Schedule Tuesday June 5th, Redwood Shores, CA. Register here (free). Content will be available via live stream, so save the date!

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In this episode we talk about string data types, comparing them to the ISO:2003 SQL standard.

Gerry has joined Tokutek - Congrats Gerry! We interviewed Martin from Tokutek in episode 86.

Conferences:
MySQL Innovation Day Schedule Tuesday June 5th, Redwood Shores, CA. Register here (free). Content will be available via live stream, so save the date!

read more

The explain statement can be an important tool for understanding how a query is being executed and what you can do to make it run better.  Although the output of EXPLAIN is relatively straightforward it can be confusing to inexperienced users or can be mangled by terminal wrapping.

To help with these problems as well as provide a pastebin for MariaDB developers to share explains during development we created The MariaDB/MySQL Explain Analyzer. This tool:

1. Helps unmangle explains (both vertical and tabular format)
2. Displays explains in an easy-to-read format.
3. Highlights and provides explanations for some terms.
4. Links to KB articles for different optimization techniques.
5. (Optionally) Allows you to save the explain for sharing.

This …

This week we present how to use pt-archiver and pt-find, two Percona Toolkit tools. We focus on the common usage of the tools and the gotchas we ran into using them.

News/Events/Feedback
Conferences:
MySQL Innovation Day Schedule Tuesday June 5th, Redwood Shores, CA. Register here (free). Content will be available via live stream, so save the date!

…

It feels like every minute a PHP developer somewhere on this planet starts implementing something aching to a CMS from scratch. Some do it because their project is "so big" it that it "obviously needs" a custom solution. Some do it because their project is "so small" it "obviously needs" just a few days of hacking .. to build a custom solution. Let me briefly focus on the later group. Working in a company with less than 10 people building websites for customers a project needs a bit of a CMS to manage those 10 "semi static" pages seems to be the poster child example of this group. The devs whip up a DB table, slap an ORM in front, maybe even use some generator for the admin UI. Done. Later the clients also wants versioning and luckily many ORMs provide some solution for that. Easy. Permissions? Most frameworks provide some ACL system. Child pages? ORM has some tree algorithm supported. Fulltext search? Integrate ElasticSearch. Custom page types? Uhm …

This week we talk about MariaDB - explaining features, and comparing to Percona's patched MySQL and Oracle's MySQL. MariaDB is touted as "a better MySQL, not a different MySQL". MariaDB is the 2nd most popular open source database, even more popular than Postgres.

Conferences:
MySQL Innovation Day Schedule Tuesday June 5th, Redwood Shores, CA. Register here (free). Content will be available via live stream, so save the date!

read more

On Friday last week, after the intensive days of the conference, Ars Technica wrote and published a nice article about MariaDB including many of the messages we had been delivering during the conference, http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2012/04/mysql-founders-latest-mariadb-release-takes-enterprise-features-open-source.ars.

MariaDB seals

Last year, when it became clear that O’Reilly wasn’t going to arrange the MySQL user conference in the future, there was a lot of discussion on who should arrange it. In the end Percona was pretty fast informing everyone that they had booked the convention center in Santa Clara to arrange the conference this year. Now with the …