The novelty of this round of talks is that thy will be 20 minutes long, rather than 1 hour. This will force all presenters to be more cautious about their timing, and to concentrate their talks on the essential. Even the experienced ones, who have given the same talk several times, will have to make an effort to come to the …

Dear MariaDB users,

MariaDB 5.1.42, a new branch of the MySQL database which includes all major open source storage engines, myriad bug fixes, and many community patches, has been released. We are very proud to have made our first final release, and we encourage you to test it out and use it on your systems.

For an overview of what’s new in MariaDB 5.1.42, please check out the release notes.

For information on installing MariaDB 5.1.42 on new servers or upgrading to MariaDB 5.1.42 from previous releases, please check out the installation guide.

MariaDB is available in source and binary form for a variety of platforms and is available from the …

Two minor news today about nice new stuff in HeidiSQL:

1. Rewritten search + replace dialog. Previously HeidiSQL used a default dialog provided by the Windows API, supporting only a small feature set, and including some nasty focussing bugs. Anyway, the new dialog can be used to find or replace stuff in your query editors and supports Perl compatible regular expressions, as implemented in SynEdit:



Shortcuts: Ctrl+F to find, Ctrl+R to replace, F3 to find/replace repeatedly

2. Customize log messages: In the preferences dialog you will find some new checkboxes, allowing you to decide which type of messages you want to see in your log panel. In fact I added a new tab just for "Logging" as the first page "Miscellaneous" got a bit crowded.

InfiniDB has a sensible Enterprise/Community release process, which seems similar to what I suggested for MySQL. Its simplicity also stands in stark contrast to MySQL’s new release policy, which is hard to understand and has been confusing people.

Related posts:

1. Thank you for the MySQL 5.4 Community Release MySQL 5.4
2. …

I can't read posts like this one without at least a little chuckle. Is the number one question you should be asking people how to start and stop MySQL on Windows? How does that really demonstrate how good someone is at their job when most people deploy on Linux[1]?

The original MySQL certification for 4.1 used to ask a whole bunch of trivia exactly like this - my favourite was a question where you had to say if a particular subqueries caused a syntax error. I don't know how this tests skill, since most subqueries shouldn't be used in production (hint: they are unoptimized in MySQL).

But MySQL changed its certification format: the new exams are Performanced-Based. This means to pass, you have to solve some of the problems you will be doing in …

I can't read posts like this one without at least a little chuckle. Is the number one question you should be asking people how to start and stop MySQL on Windows? How does that really demonstrate how good someone is at their job when most people deploy on Linux[1]?

The original MySQL certification for 4.1 used to ask a whole bunch of trivia exactly like this - my favourite was a question where you had to say if a particular subqueries caused a syntax error. I don't know how this tests skill, since most subqueries shouldn't be used in production (hint: they are unoptimized in MySQL).

But MySQL changed its certification format: the new exams are Performanced-Based. This means to pass, you have to solve some of the problems you will be doing in …

Answering questions asked on the site.

Daniel asks:

I have a table which stores track titles in a VARCHAR(200) field. The field is indexed, but searching for titles beginning with a letter Z is noticeably slower than for those beginning with A, and the closer the initial letter is to Z, the slower is the query.

My understanding is that a full table scan occurs, but EXPLAIN shows that the index is used. Besides, the table is quite large but the query is still reasonably fast.

Could you please explain this behavior?

MySQL stores its indexes in B-Tree data structures.

The Wikipedia link above explains the structure quite well so I won’t repeat it. I’ll rather draw a picture similar to the one in the …

INNODB has some irritating gotchas that makes disk space management hard. In 2002ish INNODB, added innodb_file_per_table to get around allot of these issues, but it does not fix everything.

If you are running innodb_file_per_table, you will notice in your database directory

• 
  
• db.opt - database characteristics file.
  
• tablename.frm - the table structure.
  
• tablename.ibd - the actual innodb table space file
  

Imagine that you have a table with 10 million rows and you delete say 5 million rows in multiple chunks around 400K chunks, because deletes are slow. Next, you notice that the table space file did not shrink. So what do you do? OPTIMIZE tablename, tada all the wasted space is reclaimed, but here is the PROBLEM the ibdata file grew!

ibdata stores all of the UNDO LOGS thus GROWS due to the deletes and …

Installing Nginx With PHP5 And MySQL Support On Fedora 12

Nginx (pronounced "engine x") is a free, open-source, high-performance HTTP server. Nginx is known for its stability, rich feature set, simple configuration, and low resource consumption. This tutorial shows how you can install Nginx on a Fedora 12 server with PHP5 support (through FastCGI) and MySQL support.

MONyog MySQL Monitor 3.7  Has Been Released.

From MONyog 3.7 we have introduced 3 editions of the commercial version of MONyog. When we had first released MONyog 2 years back, it was already an almost complete tool for monitoring MySQL servers based on what the MySQL server exposes on SHOW statements.  Since then we have added features that are not basic server monitoring features in the strict sense but additional or supplementing features.  Most important the Query Analyzer was added around one year ago.

Multi-user authentication is a long standing request from customers belonging to large organizations – or just having the need for monitoring lots of MySQL servers. There may be multiple server administrators. There may be development/test servers that the developers of that organization should be able to monitor, but is may also be unwanted to give them access to see details from servers having …