The MySQL developer tools team announces 6.3.6 as our GA release for MySQL Workbench 6.3.

For the full list of changes in this revision, visit
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/relnotes/workbench/en/changes-6-3.html

For discussion, join the MySQL Workbench Forums:
http://forums.mysql.com/list.php?152

Download MySQL Workbench 6.3.6 GA now, for Windows, Mac OS X 10.9+,
Oracle Linux 6 and 7, Fedora 22 and Fedora 23, Ubuntu 14.04 and
Ubuntu 15.10 or sources, from:
http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/tools/workbench/

Enjoy!

A WordCamp US this year, I spoke about the Trojan Emoji security bug, which we fixed in WordPress 4.1.2.

In particular, I went through how we came to wrap our head around the bug, and then write a solution that worked for every WordPress site.

If you have used SQL a bit, you are certainly familiar with so-called set functions or aggregate functions COUNT, SUM, AVG, described in the manual. For example, let’s say that I am the owner of a shop and I keep track of daily sales in this table:

create table sales (month int, day int, amount int);

The first column is the number of the month, between 1 and 12, the second column is the number of the day in the month, between 1 and 31, and the third column is how much we sold on that date.…

In the “MySQL Query tuning 101” video, Alexander Rubin provides an excellent example of when to use a covered index. On slide 25, he takes the query

select name from City where CountryCode = ’USA’ and District = ’Alaska’ and population > 10000

 and adds the index

cov1(CountryCode, District, population, name)

 on table

City

. With Alex’s query tuning experience, making the right index decision is simple – but what about us mere mortals? If a query is more complicated, or simply uses more than one table, how do we know what to do? Maintaining another index …

MySQL 5.7 GA was released a couple of months ago now with 5.7.9 and 5.7.10 has been published a few days ago.  So far initial testing of these versions looks pretty good and both versions have proved to be stable. I have, however, been bitten by a couple of gotchas which if you are not … Continue reading A Couple of MySQL 5.7 gotchas to be aware of

The post A Couple of MySQL 5.7 gotchas to be aware of first appeared on Simon J Mudd's Blog.

Percona is glad to announce the first release candidate of Percona Server 5.7.10-1 on December 14, 2015. Download the latest version from the Percona web site or from the Percona Software Repositories.

This release contains all the bug fixes from latest Percona Server 5.6 release (currently Percona Server 5.6.27-76.0).

New …

IBM POWER 8 is latest generation of the IBM POWER series, and it's a hot one. Above all, for you reading this, POWER 8 is the most Linux friendly so far and IBM really wants you to try this out. Seveal Linux distributions are supporting POWER 8 now, and MariaDB is of course the database of choise. Some cools things with the POWER 8 architecture are the support for CAPI (google for more details) and the fact that POWER 8 machines, due to a vastly superior memory architecture, can grow in memory size, which in general is good news but if you want your own POWER 8, this makes then a bit expensive (although maybe not when you consider the performance you get). IBM has fixed that recently and have announced the LC series of servers which start at $6.600 (see more here: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/power/hardware/linux-lc.html).

So, whar about MariaDB …

You may sometimes hear complaints about MySQL not providing good enough tools for profiling and execution analysis. A few years ago I would have agreed with such opinions, thankfully MySQL developers have made huge efforts to improve the situation in recent major versions. MySQL DBAs now have some great native diagnostic tools at their disposal... which is totally not what this article is about :)
Native MySQL tooling (whatever it might be) is just the tip of the iceberg and if you want to be a better troubleshooter, SysAdmins are the first people you should talk to. Their toolboxes are full of awesomeness and the tools they use have one significant advantage over MySQL tools: they can analyze server execution holistically, regardless of the MySQL version you may be using.
In this article, we will have a look at three OS-level tools: pstack, perf and callgrind (Valgrind tool).

Introduction Tools …

With Unicode it is possible for strings to look the same, but with slight differences in which codepoints are used.

For example the é in Café can be <U+0065 U+0301> or <U+00E9>.

The solution is to use Unicode normalization, which is supported in every major programming language. Both versions of Café will be normalized to use U+00E9.

In the best situation the application inserting data into the database will do the normalization, but that often not the case.

This gives the following issue: If you search for Café in the normalized form it won't return non-normalized entries.

I made a proof-of-concept parser plugin which indexes the normalized version of words.

A very short demo:

mysql> CREATE TABLE test1 (id int auto_increment primary key,
    -> txt TEXT CHARACTER SET utf8mb4, fulltext (txt));
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.30 sec)

mysql> CREATE TABLE test2 (id int …

There was some discussion a while back to maybe make MariaDB Server follow the Ubuntu release model, i.e. having a Long Term Release (LTS) and then having a few regular fast releases with a shorter support cycle.

However its good to note that the decision now going forward is to support each and every GA release for a period of five (5) years. However, regular releases will only happen for the latest three (3) GA releases, so at this moment, you are getting updates for MariaDB Server 5.5/10.0/10.1.

Practically, we’ve not seen an update for 5.1/5.2/5.3 since 30 Jan 2013 at the time of this writing. And its clear MariaDB Server 5.5 will have an extended support policy, as it ships in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7. 

At this time it’s worth …