MySQL is a great relational database, but at some point someone (management) in your company is probably going to say that they need to use NoSQL to store their data. After all, NoSQL is one of the latest buzzwords, so it must be good (correct?). Basically, NoSQL allows you to store data without all of the characteristics of a relational database. A very simple explanation is that you are storing all of a data set with just one primary key, and the primary key is how you also retrieve the data. While NoSQL may be good in some cases, it is hard to beat “old-fashioned” SQL relational databases – especially if that is what you know. But, with MySQL and InnoDB, you can have the best of both worlds.

With MySQL version 5.6 (and above), you have the ability to store and retrieve NoSQL data, …

Be sure to check out my other posts on mysqldump:
– Scripting Backups of MySQL with Perl via mysqldump
– Splitting a MySQL Dump File Into Smaller Files Via Perl
– Creating and restoring database backups with mysqldump and MySQL Enterprise Backup – Part 1 of 2
– Creating and restoring database backups with mysqldump and MySQL Enterprise Backup – Part 2 of 2

I have already written several posts on using mysqldump. This post will be a quick guide to using …

In MySQL, partitioning is a way to separate the data in one table into smaller “sub-tables” for better query performance and data management.

For example, let’s say that you have a database containing numerous accounting transactions. You could just store all of these transactions in one table, but you only need to keep seven year’s worth of data for tax purposes. Instead of placing all of the data in one table, and then deleting the old data from that table, you could split the table into partitions with each partition representing one year’s worth of data.

Then, after seven years, you could delete/drop the old partition. Partitions are flexible, as you can add, drop, redefine, merge, or split existing partitions (there are other options on what you could do with this data as well). Also, if you have a table that is going to contain a lot of rows, partitioning your data would …

Today, we congratulate our friends at Ubuntu on a great new release, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. As you can see in Mark Shuttleworth’s posting on Google+ from a few weeks back, MySQL has been cooperating closely with the Debian and Ubuntu communities to make sure that MySQL works very well on these platforms, and Ubuntu 14.04 […]

Ok, so I wanted to look into the new compression options of MEB 3.10.

And I would like to share my tests with you. Remember, they’re just this, tests, so please feel free to copy n paste and obtain your own results and conclusions, and should I say it, baselines, in order to compare future behaviour, on your own system.

An Oracle Linux 6.3 virtual machine with 3Gb RAM, 2 virtual threads, on a 1x quad core, windows laptop. Not pretty, but hey.

So, these tests are solely about backup. I’ll do restore when I get some *more* time.

First up, lets compare like with like, i.e. MEB version 3.9 & 3.10:

Let’s make this interesting, hence, want to use as much resources available as possible, read, write, process threads and number of buffers.

mysqlbackup --user=root --password=oracle --socket=/tmp/mysql5614.sock \
--backup-dir=/home/mysql/MEB/test --with-timestamp …

Ok, so I wanted to look into the new compression options of MEB 3.10.

And I would like to share my tests with you. Remember, they’re just this, tests, so please feel free to copy n paste and obtain your own results and conclusions, and should I say it, baselines, in order to compare future behaviour, on your own system.

An Oracle Linux 6.3 virtual machine with 3Gb RAM, 2 virtual threads, on a 1x quad core, windows laptop. Not pretty, but hey.

So, these tests are solely about backup. I’ll do restore when I get some *more* time.

First up, lets compare like with like, i.e. MEB version 3.9 & 3.10:

Let’s make this interesting, hence, want to use as much resources available as possible, read, write, process threads and number of buffers.

mysqlbackup --user=root --password=oracle --socket=/tmp/mysql5614.sock \
--backup-dir=/home/mysql/MEB/test --with-timestamp …

This is “A new dimension to MySQL query optimizations – part 2″. If you didn’t read part 1 already I suggest you skim through it before reading on.

To summarize, the problem at hand is this: Given a query with a join between two or more tables, the MySQL optimizer’s mission is to find the best combination of join order and access method so that the response time becomes as low as possible. The optimizer does this by calculating the cost of each combination and then picks the cheapest one.

Consider the following query:

SELECT *
FROM employee JOIN department ON employee.dept_no=department.dept_no
WHERE employee.first_name="John" AND
      employee.hire_date BETWEEN "2012-01-01" AND "2012-06-01"

The optimizer will calculate the cost of the alternative plans as follows:

total cost = …

A lot of customers have lagging slaves. It could be one of the top issues at support, due to the infamous row based replication without primary key issue :

If you use binlog_format = statement or mixed ,  there are several ways of monitoring the SQL thread. The most ancient is the log-slow-slave-statements  variable. From 5.6.11, it is a dynamic variable, before that you had to restart the slave mysqld to enable it.

Once on, you can trace what’s going on in the SQL thread and analyze the slow query log. Of course, as the SQL thread could be …

The MySQL developer tools team announces 6.1.3 RC – the final release candidate for MySQL Workbench 6.1.

MySQL Workbench 6.1 is the upcoming major update for the official MySQL graphical development tool.
Introducing over 30 new features, this version has many significant enhancement focusing on real-time performance assessment and analysis from the SQL statement level to server internals and file IO. You’ll see this in additions to the SQL Editor as well as new dashboard visualization and reporting that takes advantage of MySQL Server 5.6 and 5.7 Performance Schema, and enhancements to the MySQL Explain Plans.

Additionally Workbench 6.1 is leveraging work from various teammates in MySQL Engineering by introducing a schema called “SYS” that provides simplified views on Performance Schema, Information Schema, and other areas. Special thanks to the server optimizer team, server runtime team, and Mark …

We deploy Galera Cluster (in MariaDB) for some clients, and innodb_flush_logs_on_trx_commit is one of the settings we’ve been playing with. The options according to the manual:

• =0 don’t write or flush at commit, write and flush once per second
• =1 write and flush at trx commit
• =2 write log, but only flush once per second

The flush (fsync) refers to the mechanism the filesystem uses to try and guarantee that written data is actually on the physical medium/device and not just in a buffer (of course cached RAID controllers, SANs and other devices use some different logic there, but it’s definitely written beyond the OS space).

In a non-cluster setup, you’d always want it to be =1 in order to be ACID compliant and that’s also InnoDB’s default. So far so good. For cluster setups, you could be more lenient with this as you require ACID on the cluster as …