Every programmer loves to optimize, even when we know we shouldn't. To satisfy your cravings MySQL has several keywords that can be placed in your SQL statement to give the database server an explicit optimization instruction.

I should point out that using the hints incorrectly will most likley cause your queries to perform worse, so be sure that it actually makes sense to use them before you go nuts. This means use EXPLAIN and read the documentation on each hint before using.

It's also a good idea to enclose the hints within a SQL comment, for example SELECT /*! SQL_NO_CACHE */ columns FROM table. This can help to make your application a bit more portable.

Let's take a look at some MySQL Optimization Hints:

SQL_NO_CACHE

The SQL_NO_CACHE hint turns off MySQL's …

At the end of November, I activated Google Analytics to db4free.net, so now I have the data for a whole month which already shows some interesting facts about where the visitors come from, which browsers and operating system they use etc.

Very interesting is the Geo Map Overlay:



This is based on 5,736 visitors. The total number of pageviews is 21,854.

2,831 visitors used the Internet Explorer - 2,210 of them version 6.0 and 601 used version 7.0, 20 used an older version.

2,303 visitors used Firefox - 1,454 used Firefox 2.0 and 742 used Firefox 1.5 (and the rest older versions).

434 visitors used Opera.

The use of operating systems splits up as follows: 5,402 visitors use Windows (4,929 of them Windows XP), 235 use Linux and 85 MacOS.

1,014 new users registered for a new …

I just found this new HowTo at www.howtoforge.org:

http://www.howtoforge.org/secure_mysql_connection_ssh_tunnel

It describes how to set up a secure tunnel between your MySQL Server and a locally running MySQL Administrator using Putty. I haven't tried it out myself, but I strongly assume that this works for all the other GUI tools as well.

Jim Starkey's Falcon storage engine for MySQL is now available as open source.

Brian "krow" Aker has more on Falcon.

Scalability is going to be a huge focus from the community this year due to recent changes at MySQL. Tweakers.net has a pretty good breakdown of the present mySQL binary with and without the fix to INNODB scalability bug.

Tweakers.net also has an interesting comparison of POSTGRES on various platforms. It's behaving nicely under high concurrency, much better then INNODB even with the patch to it's scalability bug. If Falcon ever gets released it would be nice to Bench it.

If I get some time, I might run some of my own benchmarks to see what else can be squeezed out of MySQL.

Ismael at IT Redux claims an 83% success rate on his 2006 predictions and I like his picks for 2007. Besides the love for Mule, his notion that "the first Open Source database vendor (EnterpriseDB, Ingres, or MySQL) to release a plug-compatible replacement for the Oracle database that can support the SAP R/3 applications for over 10,000 concurrent users will get the best home run in database history since Sybase" is dead on. The legacy burden of SAP is monstrous. The OSS vendors that figure out how to make things work with SAP (in addition to trying to displace it) have a huge market opportunity.

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If you've used Mondrian, you're probably familiar with how Mondrian loads its schema from a URL embedded in the connect string.

A Mondrian connection is a URL which contains a reference to an XML file containing a Mondrian schema definition, information to connect to the JDBC database which holds the data, and various other parameters. For example,
Provider=Mondrian; Jdbc='jdbc:mysql://localhost/foodmart'; JdbcUser=foodmart; JdbcPassword=foodmart; JdbcDrivers=com.mysql.jdbc.Driver; Catalog=file:demo/FoodMart.xml
Embedded within the connect string URL is another URL, here file:demo/FoodMart.xml, from where Mondrian should load its schema.

Until now, the URL following the Catalog keyword could only one of the small number of protocols supported by java.net.URL, such as 'http' or …

Jan
Started game night. It feels like it has been longer but it was only one year ago that I started doing the board game /card game thing at my house once a month. A year later we have a hundred people on the mailing list, the event regularly has 30 or more people attending. Its fun
Went to Australia. Attended the Linux Conference there, which was one of the best conferences I have been to in years. Stayed with Arjen and Greg.
Launched Planet Asterisk.

Feb
Started hunting down Blue Tooth viruses and reading up on them.
Went to …

"[REPLACE] either inserts, or deletes and inserts."

from "REPLACE Syntax"

My question is why it is done like this? Why not simply UPDATE the row? Wouldn't it be a lot less taxing?

I’m interested to know what people consider will behold MySQL in 2007?

The announcement of “You” as Time person of the year can only considered a huge boost to the opportunities in 2007. So, in 2007 here are my 7 (in no significant order).

1. 2007 will be the year of the storage engine. We will see 5 offerings for transactional storage engines, 20+ available and practical engines for management of some form of data.
2. 2007 will see MySQL 5.1 GA (finally).
3. 2007 will see MySQL release it’s own Falcon Storage Engine (GA not until Q4 ).
4. The MySQL Winter of Code will enable the contributions of the community to change feature development. I foresee a Bounty system from an external party or parties for MySQL Features emerging.
5. MySQL will make major press inroads to the RDBMS Big 3 of Oracle, SQL Server and IBM DB2.
6. Despite efforts of MySQL AB, major installations of …