The latest from the MySQL community

Join 7500 others and follow Sean Hull on twitter @hullsean.

There’s a lot of talk on the web about scalability. Making web applications scale is not easy. The modern web architecture has so many moving parts. How can we grapple with the underlying problem?

Also: Why Are MySQL DBAs So Hard to Find?

The LAMP stack scales well

The truth that is half right. True there are a lot of moving parts, and a lot to setup. The internet stack made up of Linux, Apache, MySQL & PHP. LAMP as it’s called, was built to be resilient, dynamic, and scalable. It’s essentially why Amazon works. Why what they’re doing is possible. Windows & .NET …

This is hypothetical.

What would happen if I did the following?

alter table mysql.user add unique key(User);

I’m tossing this out there for people to think about because I’ve always thought that MySQL’s authentication model is a nuisance:

MySQL considers both your host name and user name in identifying you because there is no reason to assume that a given user name belongs to the same person on all hosts. For example, the user joe who connects from office.example.com need not be the same person as the user joe who connects from home.example.com. MySQL handles this by enabling you to distinguish users on different hosts that happen to have the same name: You can grant one set of privileges for connections by joe from office.example.com, and a different set of privileges for connections by joe from home.example.com. ( …

I’ve posted slides for my Velocity talk on VividCortex’s blog. The talk explained how we use exponentially weighted moving statistics to generate a meta-metric of abnormality for the time-series metrics measured from MySQL. That’s kind of a mouthful. Maybe you had to be there :-)

Join 6100 others and follow Sean Hull on twitter @hullsean. Lots and lots of web applications need to page through information. From customer records, to the albums in your itunes collection. So as web developers and architects, it’s important that we do all this efficiently. Start by looking at how you’re fetching information from your [...]

Join 6100 others and follow Sean Hull on twitter @hullsean. There are two ways to speedup UNIONs in a MySQL database. First use UNION ALL if at all possible, and second try to push down your conditions. [mytweetlinks] 1. UNION ALL is much faster than UNION How does a UNION work? Imagine you have two [...]

Are you a Django user? There’s an upcoming Django conference in Chicago in a few months, and I know they’re looking for speakers with MySQL experience in particular. One suggestion the organizers have floated is a talk on MySQL:

I’m looking for someone to give at least one MySQL talk there. In particular, I would love a (friendly but vigorous) “Why you should use MySQL instead of PostgreSQL talk”, as PostgreSQL tends to get a lot of love and attention at Django events, and MySQL not so much.

Take a look at it and see if you are interested. Presenting at a conference is one of the best things you can do for your career, your company, and your community of open-source software. I highly encourage it if you haven’t tried it.

On Friday I gave a presentation on “MySQL Query Patterns, Optimized” for Percona MySQL Webinars.  If you missed it, you can still register to view the recording and my slides.

Thanks to everyone who attended, and especially to folks who asked the great questions.  I answered as many as we had time for  during the session, but here are all the questions with my complete answers:

Q: Can you compare the use of subqueries/multiple joins vs. multiple queries (e.g. temp tables)?

For performance, it’s hard to make …

“Application designers need to start by thinking about what level of data integrity they need, rather than what they want, and then design their technology stack around that reality. Everyone would like a database that guarantees perfect availability, perfect consistency, instantaneous response times, and infinite throughput, but it´s not possible to create a product with [...]

Original images from Flickr user jenniferwilliams

One of our clients, for various historical reasons, runs both MySQL and PostgreSQL to support their website. Information for user login lives in one database, but their customer activity lives in the other. The eventual plan is to consolidate these databases, but thus far, other concerns have been more pressing. So when they needed a report combining user account information and customer activity, the involvement of two separate databases became a significant complicating factor.

In similar situations in the past, using earlier versions of PostgreSQL, we've written scripts to pull data from MySQL and dump it into PostgreSQL. This works well enough, but we've updated …

Last week Tokutek announced that they’re open-sourcing their TokuDB storage engine for MySQL. If you’re not familiar with TokuDB, it’s an ACID-compliant storage engine with a high-performance index technology known as fractal tree indexing. Fractal trees have a number of nice characteristics, but perhaps the most interesting is that they deliver consistently high performance under varying conditions, such as when data grows much larger than memory or is updated frequently. B-tree indexes tend to get fragmented over time, and exhibit a performance cliff when data doesn’t fit in memory anymore.

The MySQL community is excited about having access to TokuDB’s source code, and rightly so. TokuDB is, broadly speaking, aimed at the same category of use cases as Oracle’s InnoDB, …