Ok, there is no such thing. But here's the story...

Late one afternoon last week, I was preparing to review a presentation for a strategy meeting and I collided into a glass conference room door, dropping my laptop at the same time. (Visitors to our office will note that there are now dolphin stickers on the door.) Amazingly enough, my hard laptop continued to operate for another hour. As a slight precaution, I emailed myself the last file I was working on, in case things went wrong. As I drove home, I started to feel nauseous and my thinking was a bit cloudy.

When I got home, I realized that both me and my hard drive were suffering a mild concussion. The laptop would only boot part way, restarting mid-stream, even in safe mode. So I completed my work using my desktop machine and the file I had emailed to myself while holding an ice pack to my head.

The next day, I handed my laptop over to our IT gurus and they gave me a …

I'm happy to announce availability of MySQL Performance Forums on MySQL Performance Blog.

This forum is created as free alternative to MySQL Consulting Services which we provide. If you would like to get some free help to your performance issues please use forums so everyone else could benefit from our replies. You also should get more opinions on your performance problems from other forum members. There were a lot of unrelated performance questions placed as comments and sent by email and we had to find better way to organize it.

We will try to reply to messages on this forum with highest priority as time permits.

Yes there are great general MySQL Forums which grew huge and hard to follow fully, while on our local …

One of my colleagues recently redesigned a system to schedule work for programs to do, and needed to write a multiple-table UPDATE with ORDER BY and LIMIT, neither of which is supported for multiple-table UPDATE in MySQL. This article explains how to do it anyway, and shows how to rewrite a first attempt for hundreds of times better performance.

Since we are currently speaking a lot about new ideas, maybe there is one.

MySQL provides a lot of Live Web Seminars being offered as On-Demand Webinars a few days later. This is a great offer - it provides presentations from experts that everybody can join in and watch or download as soon as they are provided on the On-Demand Webinar pages - all for free.

During the Users Conference, there were some "HackFests" where developers showed how to extend functionality in code right in front of the attendees.

Maybe this could be combined with Webinars? There are many topics that can be …

Hey, that's a great topic and I very much like Zack's article and the responses (thanks Roland, Mats ... did I forget someone?).

Some time before I joined MySQL I worked for a local company (which is the biggest company in the region where I live) and I could perfectly see how it should not be. There were (and still are) very strong hierachies and if you are in the low areas of the hierachy structure, the management only wanted you to "work on something". The last thing they wanted was that employees speak up and shake on the structures of the company. No criticism was appreciated, employees should just do their daily work and even if they do …

One little known fact about MySQL Indexing, however very important for successfull MySQL Performance Optimization is understanding when exactly MySQL is going to use index and how it is going to do them.

So if you have table people with KEY(age,zip) and you will run query something like
SELECT name FROM people WHERE age BETWEEN 18 AND 20 AND zip IN (12345,12346, 12347) do you think it will use index effectively ? In theory it could - it could look at each of the ages from the range and look at all zip codes supplied. In practice - it will not:

PLAIN TEXT SQL:

1. mysql> EXPLAIN SELECT  name FROM people WHERE age BETWEEN 18 AND 20 AND zip IN (12345,12346, 12347);
2. +----+-------------+--------+-------+---------------+------+---------+------+-------+-------------+
3. | id | select_type | TABLE  | type  | …

Reading Zack Urlocker's and Mat Kindal's posts on how good ideas are killed, some more ways came to my mind:

How do you expect this to develop in the future?

A great downer for bold and new ideas is to ask how it will develop in the future. Although it's reasonable to probe for it, a future perspective should always be seen as a possible scenario at best, and not be used as lakmus test for the entire idea.

Of course, it's different for things that have been done a thousand times before. In such cases, it's reasonable to extrapolate and to assume that what happened in a similar case is like to apply here again.

Hey, that's a great idea, that's …

Again, I cannot help but follow up on Zack's post on How to Come Up With Ideas. In the modern days of hypercompetition, where today's state-of-the-art solution quickly become yesterdays news, you have to set an environment where you continuously come up with new ideas and new solutions. Creating such an environment is not an easy task, since people are... well, people.

With this in mind, I find especially Zack's first five points critical, but I would like to add two more items that I personally feel are missing.

1. Set an example

   When working as a doctoral student it was mandatory for all researchers to attend research seminars given by visiting fellows. The department's head professor always attended …

Some of you have already noticed my shift, I joined the MySQL AB professional services department full-time as a Support Engineer. Since I started at MySQL in 2001 I already did training part-time in the Australia and New Zealand region (next to my Documentation job, back then). And ye, I'll still be at some conferences, particularly in Australia.

So, Arjen in Support. It's great to get my hands dirty again (with things other than tricky licensing questions ;-). Support, by the way, is like the insurance you wish you'd taken out when your house is on fire.

MySQL's support offering is part of MySQL Network, our subscription service with a very simple per-server/per-year pricing model: we don't care about funny stuff like cores or database size.
It's available from USD 595 per server (Basic), up to USD 4995 per server (Platinum) where you get 24x7 support …