Many do not need any further introduction to this Monty tradition at MySQL events. For the New York Effective MySQL Meetup group this was a new experience for many that I had the opportunity to share at our recent meeting. In 12 months the group has grown to over 280 members, and now recent attendees have experienced black vodka first hand.

A special thanks to Monty Program AB and Colin Charles for providing the alcohol.

Following my 2 presentations at SouthEast LinuxFest on Friday and Open DB Camp on Sunday in Charlotte, NC, I will then be speaking at the first Latin America MySQL event in Buenos Aires, Argentina later this month. This will include at least six MySQL Alumni and key presentations from MariaDB and Tokutek.

I will then be attending the OTN Tour 2012 event in Cali, Colombia the following week and also a dedicated 2 day MySQL Training Days following.

Do you want to closely follow what MySQL is doing around the globe? We've created a Lanyrd guide just for that. It's curated by the MySQL Community, Marketing, Presales and Product Management teams and with some other contributions too.
Tomorrow we'll host the MySQL Innovation Day (in streaming too) and MySQL Connect is also quickly approaching. If you'd like showcase your products and services to the MySQL Community you can take advantage of the various sponsorship opportunities.

Stay tuned for the latest and greatest updates from the MySQL team at Oracle and from our vibrant community!
…

A recent question on a mailing list was the best practices for UTF-8 and PHP/MySQL. The following are the configurations I used in my multi-language projects.

MySQL UTF-8 Configuration

# my.cnf
[mysqld]
default_character_set = utf8
character_set_client       = utf8
character_set_server       = utf8
[client]
default_character_set = utf8

PHP UTF-8 Configuration

#php.ini
default_charset = "utf-8"

Apache UTF-8 Configuration

#httpd.conf
AddDefaultCharset UTF-8
<VirtualHost>
    AddCharset UTF-8   .htm
</VirtualHost>

HTML file UTF-8 Configuration

 <meta charset="utf-8">

PHP file UTF-8 Configuration

header('Content-type: text/html; charset=UTF-8');

MySQL connection (extra precaution)

SET NAMES utf8;

Shell UTF-8

And last but not least, even editing files in shell can be affected (.e.g UTF-8 data to be …

We've recently seen some great announcements of MySQL Cluster delivering amazing results for both selects and updates. The posts (see related articles below) are full of juicy technical details and proofs, but today I'd like to change the perspective a bit. Let's compare those figures with real-world data and imagine what could be done. Please note that I'm not using any scientific method here, just dreaming about the unlimited opportunities offered by MySQL Cluster today.

Cluster can deliver 1B+ selects per minute with 8 nodes …

New versions of MySQL are always interesting to try out. Often they have features which I may have asked for myself so it’s satisfying to see them eventually appear on a system I use. Often other new features make life easier for the DBA. Finally we hope overall performance will improve and managing the server(s) will be come easier.

So I had a system which needs to make heavy writes, and performance was a problem, even when writing to SSDs. Checkpointing seemed to be the big issue and the ib_logfile size in MySQL 5.5 is limited to 4 GB. That seems a lot, but once MySQL starts to fill these files (and this happens at ~70% of the total I believe),  checkpointing kicks in heavily, and slows things down.  So the main reason for trying out MySQL 5.6 was to see how things performed with larger ib_logfiles. (Yes, MariaDB 5.5 can do this too.)

Things improved a lot for my specific workload which was great news, but one thing …

Any person with half a brain would see from the error messages below that the MySQL server is not operating optimally, or more specifically the MySQL upgrade has not completely successfully and let users can go happily use the website. It amazing me when web hosting providers tell their paying client that an upgrade has been performed yet they did not have the intelligence to actually look at the error log for confirmation. Got a mysql> prompt, it’s all good. One of the first things I check is the error log.

When will people learn the MySQL error log is a valuable resource both for what it contains, and what it should not contain.

120426 17:36:00 [Note] /usr/libexec/mysqld: Shutdown complete

120426 17:36:00 mysqld_safe mysqld from pid file /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.pid ended
120426 17:36:00 mysqld_safe Starting mysqld daemon with databases from /var/lib/mysql
120426 17:36:00 [Note] Plugin 'FEDERATED' is disabled.
/usr/libexec/mysqld: …

While working with RDS and Google Cloud SQL I have come to realize that excluding the mysql schema from a mysqldump is important. However with many databases, the –all-databases option enables you only to select all or none. There is however an easy solution to exclude one or more databases in mysqldump with this little gem I created.

$ time mysqldump --databases `mysql --skip-column-names -e "SELECT GROUP_CONCAT(schema_name SEPARATOR ' ') FROM information_schema.schemata WHERE schema_name NOT IN ('mysql','performance_schema','information_schema');" >` >/mysql/backup/rds2.sql

An you can exclude as many schemas as you want.

I checked the mysqldump –help, there was no option in MySQL 5.1, asked a colleague just to be sure I wasn’t wasting my time, and it took all of 2 minutes to create and test a working solution.

mysql> show schemas;
+--------------------+
| Database           |
+--------------------+
| information_schema |
| innodb             |
| mysql              |
| performance_schema |
+--------------------+
4 rows in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> drop schema innodb;
ERROR 1010 (HY000): Error dropping database (can't rmdir './innodb/', errno: 17)

This is an additional schema that is included in an AWS RDS installation. You should not put directories in the MySQL data directory.

PC World has written a post with this title(*) about the upcoming MySQL Connect conference and references the Percona Live conference and an official Percona comment. As this is not syndicated in Planet MySQL I encourage you to read the full article.

This is the MySQL conference to get technical presentations by the many great Oracle/MySQL technical staff who will not be in attendance at Percona Live. There will also be a strong community presence in speaking at Oracle Connect in September. While Oracle was organizing a dedicated MySQL event in April for the community with all vendors including Percona to replace the conference dropped by long term partner O’Reilly (kudos …