A company blog can be easily configured in under 10 minutes using Wordpress, a popular open source LAMP product that runs a reported 12+ million blogs including those found at CNN, NY Times, Wall Street Journal (WSJ), ZDNet, MTV, People Magazine, Playstation and eBay.

A company blog is a great way for the dissemination of information to your user base as well as enabling a means of user feedback via comments.

The following steps show you how to download, configure and get your Wordpress blog operational.

Software Pre-Requisites

• Installing MySQL on Oracle Enterprise Linux
• …

If you wonder why there hasn't been an update from me for quite a while — I just returned from two months of paternal leave, in which I actually managed to stay away from the PC most of the time. In the meanwhile, I've officially become an Oracle employee and there is a lot of administrative things to take care of... But it feels good to be back!

During my absence, Giuseppe and Felix kicked off the Call for Papers for this year's European OpenSQL Camp, which will again take place in parallel to FrOSCon in St. Augustin (Germany) on August 21st/22nd. We've received a number of …

After successfully Installing MySQL, let us take a look at an operational MySQL instance on your Oracle Enterprise Linux server.

User Management

By default there will be a new mysql user and group created. This user is used to run the mysqld process is generally not used for any other purpose.

$ grep mysql /etc/{passwd,shadow,group}
/etc/passwd:mysql:x:27:27:MySQL Server:/var/lib/mysql:/bin/bash
/etc/shadow:mysql:!!:14796::::::
/etc/group:mysql:x:27:

Binaries

MySQL binaries are found in /usr/bin.

$ ls -l /usr/bin/mysql*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  314568 Feb 16 17:45 /usr/bin/mysql
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  110776 Feb 16 14:39 /usr/bin/mysqlaccess
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root   35144 Feb 16 17:45 /usr/bin/mysqladmin
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  112944 Feb 16 …

Back in 2006 I was a member of the standards and guidelines workgroup in Joomla, and during my involvement there I produced the Joomla 1.5 database schema as a DB Designer EER diagram, so people could view the database in a visual way. I recently also set up the Joomla 1.6 database schema, this time using MySQL Workbench which is a better tool for the job, and also GPL and available on multiple platforms. During my work with setting up the 1.6 schema, I came across lots of oddities and lacks of normalization, and a severe lack of naming conventions and guidelines became obvious.

Improvement suggestions

I have listed a few of these below, and please add comments to this post if you find some of your own or you disagree with me, and …

After successfully installing MySQL on Oracle Enterprise Linux installing a LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) stack can also be performed with a single command:

$ yum install -y httpd php php-mysql
# Start the Apache Httpd Process
$ /etc/init.d/httpd start

To test and confirm Apache Httpd and PHP, we can use the CLI browser lynx:

$ yum install -y lynx
$ echo "<? phpinfo() ?>" > /var/www/html/phpinfo.php
$ lynx http://localhost/phpinfo.php

If successful, you will find a web page that contains the following.

phpinfo() (p1 of 31)

   PHP Logo 

PHP Version 5.1.6

   System Linux localhost.localdomain 2.6.18-164.el5 #1 SMP Thu Sep 3 04:15:13
   EDT 2009 x86_64
   Build Date Feb 11 2010 19:07:36
   Configure …

As some might remember I made a visual representation of the Joomla 1.5 database schema back in 2006. I have now set up an EER representation of the Joomla 1.6 database schema too, that you can download for free. This schema was made after the 1.6 beta 2 release, and it was built using MySQL Workbench, which is both GPL and available as a free download for multiple platforms.

First of all: If you find any errors in this schema, make sure you leave a comment for me at the bottom. Because of the lack of conventions for naming primary key columns, I am left to do a lot of guesswork here when drawing up table relations, so there may be errors. Pretty much the only table …

One of the significant benefits of MySQL is it’s ease of use. Generally already installed on most Linux systems, MySQL can be installed by a single command if not yet present. On Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.4 you can use the following commands to check for MySQL, configure your yum repository and install MySQL.

# Check if already installed
$ rpm -qa | grep -i mysql

# Configure yum repository on new server
$ su -
$ cd /tmp
$ wget http://public-yum.oracle.com/public-yum-el5.repo
$ sed -e "s/enabled=0/enabled=1/" public-yum-el5.repo > /etc/yum.repos.d/public-yum-el5.repo

# Install MySQL
$ yum install -y mysql-server mysql

# Start and test MySQL Instance
$ /etc/init.d/mysqld start
$ mysql -uroot -e "SELECT VERSION"

+-----------+
| VERSION() |
+-----------+
| 5.0.77    |
+-----------+

You can find more …

I will be one of 18 MySQL speakers at Oracle Open World 2010 at the first ever MySQL Sunday. With a great diversity of technical, community and product talks this will be a great opportunity to get a cross section of MySQL content. Combined with Java One, this year’s Oracle Open World will include a lot more opportunity of technical and developer content then the more regular marketing material.

As the program chair for the first dedicated MySQL track at last month’s ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2010 our MySQL community now includes a larger number of target people. From the Oracle community come many highly technical and skilled resources, some with an understanding or appreciation of MySQL and many that are new to MySQL.

This is a great opportunity to share our knowledge and experience with MySQL.

References

• …

The most efficient performance optimization of a SQL statement is to eliminate it. Cary Millsap’s recent Kaleidoscope presentation again highlighted that improving performance is function of code path. Removing code will improve performance.

You may think that it could be hard to eliminate SQL, however when you know every SQL statement that is executed in your code path obvious improvements may be possible. In the sequence SQL was implemented sometimes easy observations can lead to great gains. Let me provide some actual client examples that were discovered by using the MySQL General Log.

Example 1

5 Query   SELECT *  FROM `artist`
5 Query   SELECT *  FROM `artist`
5 Query …

One role of a MySQL consultant is to review an existing production system. Sometimes you have sufficient time and access, and other times you don’t. If I am given a limited time here is a general list of things I look at.

1. Review Server architecture, OS, Memory, Disks (including raid and partition type), Network etc
2. Review server load and identify physical bottleneck
3. Look at all running processes
4. Look specifically at MySQL processes
5. Review MySQL Error Log
6. Determine MySQL version
7. Look at MySQL configuration (e.g. /etc/my.cnf)
8. Look at running MySQL Variables
9. Look at running MySQL status (x n times)
10. Look at running MySQL INNODB status (x n times) if used
11. Get Database and Schema Sizes
12. Get Database Schema
13. Review Slow Query Log
14. Capture query sample via SHOW FULL PROCESSLIST (locked …