If you’re like me, you’ve probably heard of the Spider storage engine, but not used it yet.

While it has been available for some years now, I just simply haven’t used it before until now.

I suspect that has to do with ease of installation. Previously, one had to compile it with MySQL in order to use it, which excludes a lot of people. However, in MariaDB 10.0 (as of 10.0.4), it is very easy to add and use.

And with MariaDB 10.0.8 being declared RC, combined with Spider’s sheer usefulness, I only suspect its usage will become more and more widespread.

What is the Spider storage engine, and why will it be useful?

“The Spider storage engine is a storage engine with built-in sharding features. It supports partitioning and xa transactions, and allows tables of different MariaDB instances to be handled as if they were on the same instance. It refers to one possible implementation of ISO/IEC …

On the road again - FOSSAsia

It has been a few busy months until now. I have moved from Italy to Thailand, and the move has been my first priority, keeping me from attending FOSDEM and interacting with social media. Now I start catching my breath, and looking around for new events to attend. But before I get into this, let’s make a few things clear:

• I am still working for Continuent. Actually, it’s because of my company flexibility that I could move to a different country (a different continent, 6 time zones away) without much trouble. Thanks, Continuent! (BTW: Continuent is hiring! )
• I am still involved with MySQL activities, events, and community matters. I just happen to be in a different time zone, where direct talk with people in Europe and …

One of the most expensive database operations is performing Data Definition Language (DDL, e.g. CREATE, DROP, ALTER, etc.) statements, specially, the ALTER statements because MySQL blocks the entire table for both reads and writes while modifying the table.

For the huge tables, this might take hours to get the table changed which affects the application, so that, a good planning is required for such operations in order to avoid doing these changes during the peak times. For those people who have 24/7 services or limited maintenance window, DDL on huge tables is a really nightmare.

Percona developed a very good tool called pt-online-schema-change (version 2.2.6 at the time of writing this article) to perform such operations online without blocking/affecting …

Moving data between databases is hard. Without ever intending it, I seem to have spent a lifetime working on solutions for getting data into and out of databases, but more frequently between. In fact, my first job out of university was migrating data from BRS/Text, a free-text database (probably what we would call a NoSQL) into a more structured Oracle.

Today I spend some of my time working in Big Data, more often than not, migrating information from existing data stores into Big Data so that they can be analysed, something I covered in more detail here:

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/bd-sqltohadoop1/index.html
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/bd-sqltohadoop2/index.html
…

The MySQL February Newsletter is available! Find out the latest news on MySQL products and MySQL Connect 2014, and read the technical tips written by MySQL experts at Oracle and in the community. Below are the highlights in this edition:

• Start Preparing for MySQL Connect 2014 Call for Papers
• New GA Release: MySQL for Visual Studio
• Blog: State of the UNION
• Blog: New MySQL Web Installer -- Have You Tried It Yet?
• Blog: MySQL Workbench: Frequent Crashes on Mac OS X? This Might Be The Fix
• Event: MySQL Seminars Are Coming to a City Near You

You can read it online or subscribe to it to receive the latest updates right in your inbox. Watch this …

MySQL 5.6.16 was recently released (it is the latest MySQL 5.6, is GA), and is available for download here:

http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/5.6.html

As opposed to the latest 5.5 release, this latest 5.6 release has quite a few more bug fixes, but that’s expected since 5.5 has been GA for much longer.

There were 2 minor functionality changes:

• Previously, ALTER TABLE in MySQL 5.6 could alter a table such that the result had temporal columns in both 5.5 and 5.6 format. Now ALTER TABLE upgrades old temporal columns to 5.6 format for ADD COLUMN, CHANGE COLUMN, MODIFY COLUMN, ADD INDEX, and FORCE operations. This conversion cannot be done using the INPLACE algorithm, so specifying ALGORITHM=INPLACE in these cases results in an error. (Bug #17246318)
• CMake now supports a -DTMPDIR=dir_name option to specify the default …

A couple of weeks ago, shortly after Vadim wrote about Percona Cloud Tools and using Slow Query Log to capture the data, Mark Leith asked why don’t we just use Performance Schema instead? This is an interesting question and I think it deserves its own blog post to talk about.

First, I would say main reason for using Slow Query Log is compatibility. Basic Slow query log with microsecond query time precision is available starting in MySQL 5.1, while events_statements_summary_by_digest table was only added in MySQL 5.6 which was out for …

One of the first tasks when setting up a new MySQL server is creating users and granting them permissions, or giving them the ability to do stuff in MySQL. By default, a single user, the root user, is created when you setup MySQL. This user is granted all privileges on the entire system, which means you should create separate logins for administrators and applications. Let’s walk through all the basic steps you need to create a new user and give them permissions.

Create a User

The first command I’ll show you is pretty simple:

Create User bob@'%' Identified By 'Astr0ngPhr@$e';

Before we move on, let’s check that user’s permissions:

Show Grants for bob@'%';

Which should show something like:

+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Grants for bob@% …

MySQL is widely used throughout the world. With users groups in many countries. In fact Oracle even tracks these on a wiki page.

Look at the map of Europe. See a pin missing ?

Would you be interested in filling it in ? Maybe we can gather and share MySQL related knowledge ? We do have some MySQL developers that are based in Bulgaria. And probably a lot of very advanced MySQL users too. All of us can benefit from talking to each other IMHO.

Please let me know if you'd be interested into gathering every now and then and talking MySQL. If there are people interested I'm sure we'll figure out the details.

EDIT : I've created a MySQL Bulgaria Meetup page.  Please feel free to sign up and start talking !

Over the past few years, we’ve seen MySQL technology advance in leaps and bounds, especially when it comes to scalability. But by focusing on the internals of the storage engine for so long, MySQL has fallen behind regarding support for advanced SQL features.

SQLite, another popular open-source SQL database, just released version 3.8.3, including support for recursive SQL queries using the WITH RECURSIVE syntax, in compliance with SQL:1999.

Why is this significant? It means that MySQL is now the only widely-used SQL implementation that does not support recursive queries. Fifteen years after it was defined in the SQL standard, almost every other SQL database of note has supported this feature:

• …