This may appear a bit of a rant - but it's really intended as more of an observation from having trained people how to use MySQL, and noticing that everyone seems to make the same beginner mistakes. If you read the "Continued MySQL Values" on the MySQL Website, you'll notice that the third one in the list is:

• The best and the most-used database in the world for online applications
• Available and affordable for all
• Easy to use
• Continuously improved while remaining fast, secure and reliable
• Fun to use and improve
• Free from bugs

Note that "Fun to use" doesn't sound much like a database, and "free from bugs" will always be a distant dream ;).

It was Easy to Use that got me into MySQL, but I think this is one of …

This may appear a bit of a rant - but it's really intended as more of an observation from having trained people how to use MySQL, and noticing that everyone seems to make the same beginner mistakes. If you read the "Continued MySQL Values" on the MySQL Website, you'll notice that the third one in the list is:

• The best and the most-used database in the world for online applications
• Available and affordable for all
• Easy to use
• Continuously improved while remaining fast, secure and reliable
• Fun to use and improve
• Free from bugs

Note that "Fun to use" doesn't sound much like a database, and "free from bugs" will always be a distant dream ;).

It was Easy to Use that got me into MySQL, but I think this is one of …

The last couple of years, I have had the pleasure of moderating panels at the MySQL Conference. Last year, it was about scaling MySQL, and the year before that, it was the Clash of the DB Egos.

For this year, the original plan was for a MySQL Roadmap Shootout. Many of these questions Karen Tegan Padir should address in her opening keynote, and Robin Schumacher and Rob Young will dig deeper in “The Future of MySQL“.

Hence, we decided to aim higher: We’re going for the clouds. This year’s new topic is “ …

I have recently been investigating a bew feature of MySQL 6.0 - the "Pool-of-Threads" scheduler. This feature is a fairly significant change to the way MySQL completes tasks given to it by database clients.

To begin with, be advised that the MySQL database is implemented as a single multi-threaded process. The conventional threading model is that there are a number of "internal" threads doing administrative work (including accepting connections from clients wanting to connect to the database), then one thread for each database connection. That thread is responsible for all communication with that database client connection, and performs the bulk of database operations on behalf of the client.

This architecture exists in other RDBMS implementations. Another common implementation is a collection of processes all cooperating via a region of shared memory, usually with semaphores or other synchronization objects located in that shared …

MySQL Workbench has already received some great accolades this year and there is more to come!

Now, those attending the MySQL Users Conference will have a chance to become a MySQL schema design expert.

The Conference will include a free MySQL Workbench workshop called “Introduction to Data Modeling with MySQL Workbench” on Thursday (April 23, 2009) 3 - 4:30 PM in the Santa Clara Ballroom. According to Mike Zinner, MySQL Workbench …

MySQL Workbench has already received some great accolades this year and there is more to come!

Now, those attending the MySQL Users Conference will have a chance to become a MySQL schema design expert.

The Conference will include a free MySQL Workbench workshop called “Introduction to Data Modeling with MySQL Workbench” on Thursday (April 23, 2009) 3 - 4:30 PM in the Santa Clara Ballroom. According to Mike Zinner, MySQL Workbench …

Alas, I won’t be attending the conference but in reading the speaking schedules, I found several talks that I hope will be recorded and published later.  Many are directly applicable to our customers and the work we do for them, some would tickle my inner geek and a few are super interesting for what they portend for the data management space.

Scale Up, Scale Out and HA – this is always a great topic.  ever changing thanks to very creative administrators and developers solving real world problems.

Advanced Query Manipulation with MySQL Proxy - proxy has so many potential applications, i’d love to see what Kay is going to talk about.

MySQL …

There are several key changes in Wordcraft 0.9.1. The two big things are:

• Tokens on post forms in the admin to help ward off CSRF attacks.  
• Database schema updates automated.

The first comes as a result of us doing the same work on Phorum recently.  I realized I needed the same protection in Wordcraft.  The second was done out of neccesity as I changed the datetime fields in the database schema into int fields.  Not sure why I ever made them datetime fields.  Unix timestamps are much easier to work with.  It saves many strtotime() calls and will make eventual time zone settings much easier to implement.

In addition to those two big ones, there were some notable small ones:

• HTML 4.01 validation fixes
• Ensuring UTF-8 on all …

At MySQL/Sun we do a lot of high availability setup using Heartbeat but recently I was involved, along with Harold Mayfield (a VCS expert), in project using Symantec VCS on Solaris. Of course, MySQL works perfectly well with VCS, here are a few highlights of the installation.

Apart from the share store resources and the IP resources, MySQL is configured as the following:

        Application insiderDB-app (
                StartProgram = "/san/mysql/bin/mysqld --defaults-file=/etc/my.cnf &"
                StopProgram = "/san/mysql/bin/mysqladmin -u root shutdown"
                MonitorProgram = "/san/vcs_scripts/mysql_monitor"
                )

and the mysql_monitor script is the following:

#!/bin/ksh

STATUS=$(/usr/bin/echo status | /san/mysql/bin/mysql -u root 2>/dev/null |/usr/bin/grep -c Uptime) 

if [ "$STATUS" -eq "1" ]
then
        exit 110
else
        exit 100
fi

Here are some common performance tuning concepts that I frequently run into. Please note that this really is only a basic introduction to performance tuning. For more in-depth tuning, it strongly depends on your systems, data and usage. Server Variables For tuning InnoDB performance, your primary variable is innodb_buffer_pool_size. This is the chunk of memory that InnoDB uses for caching data,