I'm subscribed to a lot of mailing lists - PHP, mod_perl, MySQL, web application security, etc. This week, there was an interesting conversation on the NYPHP mailing list - consulting rates.

It all started with an email from Edward Potter. He had previously emailed the list to inquire about consulting rates and was sharing the results with everyone:

Just to keep everyone up to date, based on interviews to …

I'm subscribed to a lot of mailing lists - PHP, mod_perl, MySQL, web application security, etc. This week, there was an interesting conversation on the NYPHP mailing list - consulting rates.

It all started with an email from Edward Potter. He had previously emailed the list to inquire about consulting rates and was sharing the results with everyone:

Just to keep everyone up to date, based on interviews to …

MySQL statement-based replication is widely discussed, but I haven't seen much about how to design a replication setup for low downtime and easy administration. Statement-based replication has inherent shortcomings experienced MySQL users know to avoid, but rarely write about. This article explains how to avoid problems, help your slaves stay in sync with the master, and recover from disasters more quickly.

About an hour ago, I got back from Washington, DC after spending four days attending a very productive MySQL performance tuning training session. I really enjoyed conversations with old and new friends including:

• Tobias Asplund, Instructor
  
• Ronald Bradford, Senior Consultant MySQL Inc.
• Michael "Mike" Amedeo Alaimo, IT Manager, Distributive Networks
  
• Stephen Spitzer, Learning Resource Center, USUHS
• Nyk Cowham, Systems Architect, Forum One Communications
• Joe Mansour, Web App. Programmer, and Donnie Lynn, DBA, Computing Center, …

Kathy Sierra’s closing keynote at linux.conf.au 2007 was a rather interesting one. I took away a lot from it, and while I might not be giving a summary of my thoughts here, one of her slides had a quote about a fake book she co-authored, that made me chuckle a little.

“So does this mean Ruby programmers are more emo than, say, Perl programmers?

MySQL people are definitely 5000% more emo than PostgreSQL people.”

Some will recognize that from a comment made in her blog post, Announcing The Emo Programmer book. But I took another parallel to the statement, because in the past few weeks, the MySQL community have been taking the recent Enterprise/Community announcements in a rather unwelcoming way.

MySQL are not getting rid of binaries in the Community release, as …

I'm a big fan of what I call cookbooks. Cookbooks are step-by-step directions that if followed, will yield the desired result. In fact, most of my cookbooks are copy & past enabled so that you copy a command from the cookbook and paste it into your window to execute the command. I insist my people use these established methods where available and I get pretty ticked off when they waste a lot of time trying to figure out what has already been learned.

I've installed Oracle on Linux about 50 times over the past few months. After the second succesfull install, I created a cookbook for both 9i and 10g. If followed exactly, any DBA will be able to install Oracle correctly in my environment. I created the cookbook and I know it like the back of my hand. I don't need no stinkin cookbook and proceeded to do a fresh install of 9.2.0.8 when the installer hangs at 18% linking naeet.o.

"Hmm, …

Late in 2006 MySQL decided to move to a split distribution model, Community and Enterprise. A lot has (apparently) changed since then, yet nothing has really changed since then. These things remain true: MySQL is freely available in both source and binary form – free as in freedom, and free as in beer. The MySQL community continues to get every single bug fix for free. The only real change the MySQL community sees is less frequent official binary builds.

MySQL statement-based replication is widely discussed, but I haven’t seen much about how to design a replication setup for low downtime and easy administration. Statement-based replication has inherent shortcomings experienced MySQL users know to avoid, but rarely write about. This article explains how to avoid problems, help your replicas stay in sync with the master, and recover from disasters more quickly. By the way, I’m fairly new to MySQL replication.

We all know disk based temporary tables are bad and you should try to have implicit temporary tables created in memory where possible, do to it you should increase tmp_table_size to appropriate value and avoid using blob/text columns which force table creation on the disk because MEMORY storage engine does not support them Right ?

Wrong.

In fact setting tmp_table_size is not enough as MySQL also looks at max_heap_table_size variable and uses lower value as a limit to for in memory temporary table after which it will be converted to MyISAM.

To make things more confusing this is not what you would read in MySQL manual as far as I understand it:
From http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/memory-storage-engine.html

MEMORY table contents are stored in memory, which is a property that MEMORY tables share with internal tables that the server …

Welcome to the 28th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs. It was a busy week in the blogs, but then, it always is. Let’s start with some open source software (OSS) items. Stephen Walli published two far-looking “thought experiments” on Once More unto The Breach. In the first, entitled Microsoft and [...]