The MariaDB project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of MariaDB 10.0.9. This is a Release Candidate release.

Among other changes, XtraDB is now the default InnoDB implementation, Oracle’s InnoDB is included as a plugin and can be dynamically loaded if desired. Packages for Ubuntu 14.04 “trusty” and Debian “Sid” have also been added to the MariaDB Ubuntu and Debian repositories.

See the Release Notes and Changelog for detailed information on this release and the …

MySQL’s Performance Schema is an incredibly rich and versatile instrumentation engine, but apparently, with great power, comes increased complexity for the user to understand up front.

I think this is pretty natural:

• The more flexibility you provide to the user on what to monitor (and this is one of the major goals of Performance Schema) – the more there is to twiddle from a configuration perspective.
• The more data we provide in as generic a ways as possible – the more data there is.

Performance Schema is also only going to grow over time. There are many many missing bits of instrumentation within MySQL that users want us to add, and for the most part, most of those new things are now going in to Performance Schema. Things such as memory …

Percona Server version 5.6.16-64.0

Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona Server 5.6.16-64.0 on March 10th, 2014 (Downloads are available here and from the Percona Software Repositories.

Based on MySQL 5.6.16, including all the bug fixes in it, Percona Server 5.6.16-64.0 is the current GA release in the Percona Server 5.6 series. All of Percona’s …

One of the tasks within Percona Remote DBA is to ensure we have reliable backups with minimal impact. To accomplish this, one of the tools our team uses is called mydumper. We use mydumper for logical backups because of several nice features. Some of them are:

• multithreaded, producing very fast backups compared to mysqldump
• almost no locking, if not using non innodb tables
• built-in compression
• separate files for each table, making it easy to restore single tables or schema, and the possibility to hardlink files reducing the space needed to keep history of backups. Also this feature give you the possibility to restore with more than one thread.

The mydumper project was started at the beginning of 2009 by …

Percona Server version 5.5.36-34.0

Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona Server 5.5.36-34.0 on March 10th, 2014 (Downloads are available here and from the Percona Software Repositories). Based on MySQL 5.5.36, including all the bug fixes in it, Percona Server 5.5.36-34.0 is now the current stable release in the 5.5 series. All of Percona‘s software is open-source and free, all the details of the …

If you have a busy schedule or too much going on to attend a live training session, Training-on-Demand is for you. With Training-on-Demand, you can watch recorded classroom sessions taught by top Oracle instructors and gain hands-on experience with a dedicated lab environment.

In viewing the classroom sessions, you access streaming lectures on your desktop or tablet, with the ability to fast-forward, pause, rewind and search.

MySQL for Database Administrators is available as training-on-demand. This course is designed for DBAs and other database professionals. Learn to configure the MySQL Server, set up replication and security, perform database backups and performance tuning and protect MySQL …

There may be times when you need to create a new table in MySQL and feed it with data from another database, the Internet or from combined data sources. MS Excel is commonly used as the bridge between those data sources and a target MySQL database because of the simplicity it offers to organize the information to then just dump it into a new MySQL table. Although the last bit sounds trivial, it may actually be a cumbersome step, creating ODBC connections within Excel through Microsoft Query may not help since these are normally created to extract data from MySQL into Excel, not the opposite. What if you could do this in a few clicks from within Excel after making your data ready for export to a MySQL database?

With MySQL for Excel you can do this and this guide will teach you how easy it is.

Digging through piles of old stuff in the house, I came across a nice little artifact of MySQL history, an old business card. One benefit of a small company is that you can tend to get your first name @company.com, which of course, I had.

I wonder which other MySQL AB employees still have a business card laying around somewhere?

Firebird is an open-source DBMS with a long history and good SQL support. Although I measured Firebird's importance as smaller than MySQL's or MariaDB's, it exists, and might grow a bit when Firebird becomes the default LibreOffice DBMS.

I decided to compare the current versions of MySQL 5.6 and Firebird SQL 2.5. I only looked at features that end users can see, without benchmarking. Preparing for the comparison was easy. I looked at the instructions for downloading Firebird with Ubuntu and within 15 …

The MySQL Fabric framework brings two major features: automatic client- and server-side failover and sharding. The manual hints, you need a “Fabric aware driver” for this but it does not list one for PHP. First, you don’t necessarily need new drivers! Second, the "driver" for PHP is the current development version of the PECL/mysqlnd_ms replication and load balancing plugin. The plugin covers the sharding but not the failover/HA quickstart example of Fabric: how the plugin works and why you should not use the plugin – yet.

Partial replication: the unlimited mode

At some …