I’m in the process of converting some very large data tables to partitioned tables. By “In the process” I mean “scripts are running as we speak and I’m monitoring what’s going on.” When I did this in our test environment (2 or 3 times to be sure), I got familiar with the information_schema.partitions table. There […]

Martin Brown’s blog shows a pretty good way of navigating the MySQL Reference Manual. It’s worth noting, however, that finding the different topics has been a lot easier since mysql.com started using a Google appliance for its search.

I use the documentation all the time and have been doing so for years (I won’t claim that I can remember +2000 pages worth of ever-changing content). A few years back, I stopped using the search box on dev.mysql.com because the result sets were enormous, with lots of unrelated references. My technique was to do a Google site search:

For replication use the expression: replication site:http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/index.html

The …

For everybody interested, please check out this very descriptive tutorial written by Adrian ‘yEnS’ Mato Gondelle. It shows how to create a database schema design with MySQL Workbench.

• How to make a brilliant mysql forum database from scratch

If you have written your own tutorials or blog posts about MySQL Workbench please drop us an email and we might feature it on our blog.

I love teaching EXPLAIN in training classes with the world.sql sample database. One of my favorite edge cases to try and explain to students is:

SELECT Name FROM Country WHERE continent = 'Asia' AND population > 1 000 000 000;

If you add an index on Continent,Population and Population, MyISAM will choose to use the composite index (Continent,Population), whereas InnoDB will choose just the Population index.

It's a simple geography question... all of the countries in the world with > 1B people *are* in Asia. Since both indexes are equally effective, InnoDB chooses to use the one with the shorter key_len, despite the fact it will have to do a second stage check on the data rows to verify this.

I think that this decision (shorter index) is the right one - since unless the database has index pinning, it should …

I love teaching EXPLAIN in training classes with the world.sql sample database. One of my favorite edge cases to try and explain to students is:

SELECT Name FROM Country WHERE continent = 'Asia' AND population > 1 000 000 000;

If you add an index on Continent,Population and Population, MyISAM will choose to use the composite index (Continent,Population), whereas InnoDB will choose just the Population index.

It's a simple geography question... all of the countries in the world with > 1B people *are* in Asia. Since both indexes are equally effective, InnoDB chooses to use the one with the shorter key_len, despite the fact it will have to do a second stage check on the data rows to verify this.

I think that this decision (shorter index) is the right one - since unless the database has index pinning, it should …

If you haven’t done so already, please take the new quickpoll that’s on the MySQL dev zone.  We’re gathering feedback on what features you’d like to see most after the first cut of the new MySQL backup is released in version 6.0.

If you haven’t kicked the tires of the new backup yet, you can download it here.  And if you want to see the new backup in action, you can check out the article I wrote on it here.

Thanks for your feedback!

What started as some chat about having a one-day event, after MyGOSSCon, on the 26th of September 2008, about open source, has turned into a full-blown conference, to be pulled off in about a month, affectionately known as foss.my. Its being held at APIIT from November 8-9 2008, and is touted to be the most technical conference of its kind in South East Asia.

We want people to participate as speakers, delegates, sponsors, or volunteers. This is a grassroots event, and its purely non-commercial - no vendor talks, or marketing gimmicks are permitted. Largely the motto is very foss.in/linux.conf.au-ish - both community events I truly enjoy going to, and wouldn’t miss for the world.

The …

I woke up today at 4:45 am, which is a completely worthless time to be awake. I lay there for twenty minutes tracking post-REM phosphenes and thinking random thoughts. Here's one of them.

The Planet MySQL aggregator ranks blogs according to 'activity', or number of posts in the last month. I typically care little for such things because unnecessary attention attracts unwanted expectation. However, were one to care about such things, this method of ranking favors those who tend to post like this:
Sunday, October 5
I broke my pencil but that's ok because I have another pencil.

Monday, October 6
I like Drizzle.

Tuesday, October 7
I like, drizzle.

Wednesday, October 8
I believe I lost my shoes, Clyde. I think the dog got 'em.

Free idea: Rank blogs using a Prolificity factor that …

[This has nothing to do with the financial crisis or the McCain/FeyPalin ticket. Sorry.]

Last Wednesday began innocently enough. Philip's email to the Falcon team, "Regarding Falcon Recovery", lamented the lack of progress in fixing recovery bugs. He detailed specific failures that he was seeing, many of them new, and pointed out that that the number of recovery bugs was increasing. He closed with"All of this means that the recovery problems must be tackled immediately and head-on. A database without functioning recovery can be at most alpha-quality software."He was, of course, absolutely right. The lack of reliable database recovery is like flying with non-locking landing gear, so we took a hard look at the problem.

Then all hell broke loose.

Falcon Recovery …

Back on popular demand, Sebastian Bergmann will teach his 3-day workshop Quality Assurance in PHP Projects in Australia again! It's scheduled 8-10 December in Sydney.

Many applications using MySQL are written in PHP... this three-day workshop will introduce/update PHP Developers to writing unit tests for the backend and system tests for the frontend of a web application as well as managing the quality from development to deployment and maintainance using tools such as PHPUnit, Selenium RC, phpUnderControl, PHP_CodeSniffer, and …