Today, while on IRC in #pentaho I came across a discussion and a published my.cnf. In this configuration I found some grossly incorrect values for per session buffers (see below).

It doesn’t take a MySQL expert to spot the issues, however there is plenty of bad information available on the Internet and developers not knowing MySQL well can easily be mislead. This has spurred me to create a program to rid the world of bad MySQL configuration. While my task is potential infinite, it will enable me to give back and hopefully do a small amount of good. You never know, saving those CPU cycles may save energy and help the planet.

Stay tuned for more details of my program.

[mysqld]
...
sort_buffer_size = 6144K
myisam_sort_buffer_size = 1G
join_buffer_size = 1G
bulk_insert_buffer_size = 1G
read_buffer_size     = 6144K
read_rnd_buffer_size = 6144K
key_buffer_size         = 1024M
max_allowed_packet      = 32M
thread_stack            = …

Let me start by saying the majority of environments never experience problems of MySQL crashing. I have seen production environments up for years. On my own server I have seen 575 days of MySQL uptime and the problem was hardware, not MySQL.

However it does occur, and the reasons may be obscure.

Confirming mysqld has crashed

To the unsuspecting, MySQL may indeed be crashing and you never know about it. The reason is because most MySQL installations have two running processes, these are mysqld and mysqld_safe.

ps -ef | grep mysqld
root     28822     1  0 Feb22 ?        00:00:00 /bin/sh bin/mysqld_safe
mysql    28910 28822  0 Feb22 ?        00:30:08 /opt/mysql51/bin/mysqld --basedir=/opt/mysql51 --datadir=/opt/mysql51/data --user=mysql --log-error=/opt/mysql51/log/error.log --pid-file=/opt/mysql51/data/dc1.onegreendog.com.pid

One of the functions of mysqld_safe is to restart mysqld if it fails. Unless you review …

I’m seeking help from the MySQL community for what tools are used today to generate complex reports for enterprise applications that use MySQL. In an Oracle world, you have Oracle Report Writer, in Microsoft Crystal Reports.

In the open source world there is Jasper Reports, Pentaho Reports and BIRT however I don’t know the power of complex reporting with these.

If anybody has experience using or evaluating these tools please let me know. This may lead to possible work.

The NoSQL/relational database debate has been going on for quite some time. MariaDB, like MySQL is relational. And if you read these series of blog posts, you’ll realise that if you use MySQL correctly, you can achieve quite a lot.

1. It all starts with Kellan Elliott-McCrea with his introductory post on Using, Abusing and Scaling MySQL at Flickr. Follow the entire series.
2. He starts of the series with Ticket Servers: Distributed Unique Primary Keys on …

Having covered the preparation and character set options of performing a latin1 to utf8 MySQL migration, just how do you perform the migration correctly.

Example Case

Just to recap, we have the following example table and data.

mysql> select c,length(c),char_length(c),charset(c), hex(c) from conv.test_latin1;
+---------------+-----------+----------------+------------+----------------------------+
| c             | length(c) | char_length(c) | charset(c) | hex(c)                     |
+---------------+-----------+----------------+------------+----------------------------+
| a             |         1 |              1 | latin1     | 61                         |
| abc           |         3 |              3 …

MySQL has the same level of data integrity for numbers and strings as Oracle; when MySQL is correctly configured. By default (a reason I wish I knew why it is still the default), MySQL performs silent conversions on boundary conditions of data that will result in your data not always being what is specified. Let’s look at the following examples to demonstrate default behavior.

For numbers

mysql> DROP TABLE IF EXISTS example;
mysql> CREATE TABLE example(i1  TINYINT, i2 TINYINT UNSIGNED, c1 VARCHAR(5));
mysql> INSERT INTO example (i1) VALUES (1), (-1), (100), (500);
Query OK, 4 rows affected, 1 warning (0.08 sec)
mysql> SELECT * FROM example;
+------+------+------+
| i1   | i2   | c1   |
+------+------+------+
|    1 | NULL | NULL |
|   -1 | NULL | NULL |
|  100 | NULL | NULL |
|  127 | NULL | NULL |
+------+------+------+
4 rows in set (0.00 sec)

As you can see for one value we inserted 500, yet the value …

While some may think I’m daft, I have a legitimate reason for wanting to crash mysqld. However first we need to find a way to crash it.

Great thanks to Alan K, Mark L, Harrison and Hartmut on #mysql-dev for several suggestions and a config option I was unaware of. My investigation even lead to a documentation bug logged as #51739.

My first thought was to find a known bug and if necessary install the correct version to test that. A good one was suggested, Bug #48508 which fails on several versions that I will use to demonstrate with, however the simplest way is to issue kill -11

By default, no core file will be produced which is what I’m seeking but with the right options this is possible. First, the user running mysqld probably has a core file limit size of 0.

$ ulimit …

MySQL by default is a NON transactional database. For the hobbyist (See The Hobbyist and the Professional), startup entrepreneur and website developer this may not appear foreign, however to the seasoned Oracle DBA who has only used Oracle the concept is very foreign.

In MySQL you have to be concerned with two situations that will catch the unprepared out. The first is the default autocommit mode. This is TRUE, i.e. all statements are automatically committed on completion.

mysql> SELECT @@autocommit,TRUE;
+--------------+------+
| @@autocommit | TRUE |
+--------------+------+
|            1 |    1 |
+--------------+------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

The second is the storage engine used. Again a foreign term for Oracle DBA’s, a storage engine is a technology that stores and retrieves the underlying data from the …

This month will see the release of the book Expert PHP and MySQL which I was a co-author of. Initially this will be available for purchase in PDF format from the Wrox website and I am hopeful this will be available in print format for the MySQL Users Conference.

More then just your standard PHP and MySQL there is detailed content on technologies including Memcached, Sphinx, Gearman, MySQL UDFs and PHP extensions. We will be posting more information at www.ExpertPhpandMySQL.com. You can download a PDF version of Chapter 1 Techniques Every Expert Programmer Needs to Know.

The book includes the following content:

I’ve heard about the innodb_plugin but not had time to put it to the test.

Recently though due to some problems I’ve been having with the MySQL Enterprise Monitor (Merlin) I’ve had to try a few changes and had the opportunity to try out the innodb plugin.

I have been using Merlin for some time and like it a lot. It is not perfect but does a good job for me.  However, since upgrading to version 2.1 I have been having some database load problems. I long ago split the merlin server into a front- and back-end server with the backend running a standard MySQL 5.1 Advanced package. That has been working fine.

I have been monitoring more and more mysqld servers and recently the database backend could not cope. Basically the writes of …