Update: WordPress 4.2 has full UTF-8 support! There’s no need to upgrade manually any more. ?

For many years, MySQL had only supported a small part of UTF-8, a section commonly referred to as plane 0, the “Basic Multilingual Plane”, or the BMP. The UTF-8 spec is divided into “planes“, and plane 0 contains the most commonly used characters. For a long time, this was reasonably sufficient for MySQL’s purposes, and WordPress made do with this limitation.

It has always been possible to store all UTF-8 characters in the latin1 character set, though latin1 has shortcomings. While it recognises the connection between upper and lower case characters in Latin alphabets (such as English, French and German), it doesn’t recognise the same connection for other alphabets. For example, it doesn’t know …

MySQL Utilities provide a collection of command line utilities that make it easy for database administrators to maintain and administer MySQL servers. The utilities perform a range of otherwise complex operations via a simple command, making DBAs more efficient and productive.

There are utilities for copying databases, comparing databases running on different servers, checking disk usage and for redundant or duplicate indexes, automatic failover, verifying replication configuration, cloning a running server, and working with audit logs. You can use all these utilities either standalone or with MySQL Workbench.

You can learn about MySQL Utilities and much more by taking the …

This is a follow up to the :  WebScaleSQL Installation attempted... part 1

So being a typical geek, developer, idiot or whatever.. I failed to RTFM or in this case the FAQ.

So once I paid attention and didn't just rush into it,  I installed WebScaleSQL correctly.
The biggest problem was that I was using the Linux OS (Oracle Linux VM) which is just too old and  the Oracle repositories did little to help get it upgraded. While I wanted to start with something that everyone could use easily, that just was not it.

I downloaded …

A real fast list of stuff from the Percona Live 2014 event.

Yahoo’s Performance Analyzer

Yahoo is developing a MySQL performance analyzer that should be released as open source later this year. From the demo, it looks like it pulls in most of the MySQL metrics, shows you a processlist and then lets you drill into a processlist with explain. Will have to keep my eye out for this.

ChatOps with Hubot

GitHub’s Sam Lambert has a set of hubot chatops scripts for MySQL. I was already looking at depoying hubot for the ability to push messages from a remote source into an IRC channel, so this would be a natural fit. He also mentioned using Janky to tie CI with hubot.

DevOps at Outbrain

Shlomi …

As any server farm scales out, it becomes increasingly difficult to Watch All The Things™. I’ve been watching the progress of LogStash+ElasticSearch+Kibana (also known as an ELK stack) for a while and gave it a go this weekend. The trick for me was wanting to run each element inside of a separate Docker container so that I have easily portable elements to scale out with.

A step back. What is Docker? Docker is a container (using LXC) around an application. In short, you install Docker, start a container using a base image (CentOS, Ubuntu, etc.) and then run the container, dropping you into a shell. From here, you configure your application, then save your container. You …

The MySQL community continues to amaze me, everyone is friendly and always willing to answer questions and help others. It’s always nice to meet people in-person that I’ve met virtually in the last 12 months. Percona Live 2014 MySQL Conference and Expo in Santa Clara just wrapped up and I wanted to share my highlights of the event before I unplug for the weekend.

• I heard several stories of people’s experiences with TokuDB, open sourcing 12 months ago has been a huge success for Tokutek. We have a growing community in our tokudb-user Google Group, please share your experiences and help others.
• In his “Galera Cluster New Features” presentation, Sappo Jaakola of …

Dear MySQL Users,
MySQL Connector/NET 6.7.5, a new version of the all-managed .NET driver for MySQL has been released.  This is a Maintenance release. It is recommended for production environments.  It is appropriate for use with MySQL server versions 5.0-5.7.
It is now available in source and binary form from http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/net/#downloads and mirror sites (note that not all mirror sites may be up to date at this point-if you can't find this version on some mirror, please try again later or choose another download site.)
Also Nuget packages are available:
http://www.nuget.org/packages/MySql.Data/6.7.5
…

Facebook’s Yoshinori Matsunobu

I spoke with Facebook database engineer Yoshinori Matsunobu here at Percona Live 2014 today about a range of topics, including MySQL at Facebook, the company’s recent move to WebScaleSQL, new MySQL flash storage technologies – and why attending the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo each year is very important to him.

Facebook engineers are hosting several sessions at this year’s conference and all have been standing room only. That’s not too surprising considering that Facebook, the undisputed king of online social networks, has 1.23 billion monthly active …

UPDATE: Several people have commented that decimal(10,2) is not correct for money, since sometimes currencies go out to more than 2 decimal places. Others claimed that storing cents (or base unit) as integers make it simpler to perform calculations (thanks, Kevin Farley for your comment). Regardless of what you choose – don’t use floats for money. If you do use integers, I would include the base unit in the name to avoid confusion (AmountInCents).

Data types make all the difference in the world when you’re designing your database. The choices you make now will affect the quality of your data, as well as application performance. I’m going to focus on one issue in this article: why you should always use decimals to represent money. Let’s jump in and see why that’s true.

An example of floats gone wrong

Let’s use a really, really simplified accounting ledger. It’s just three fields, an entry id, …

The Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo ends today but it signals a rebirth of the MySQL Community. 2014 has been the most vibrant, upbeat, and cheerful show in many years. A multitude of new technology, approaches and energies emerged this year.

WebScale is partnership of several of MySQL’s biggest users to pool patches to make a bigger, badder server. Frankly these companies have more resources than MySQL in some areas and will be able to add in features very quickly. And Oracle really wants to add these changes quickly.

Fusion-IO is changing the way we think about writing to disks. The costs of a write is low and the speed is very high. For those of us having cut our teeth on systems where you had to plan for rotational delay and disk arm movements, this is almost spooky. SSDs are going to change many design ideas in the database world and Fusion-IO is working hard with Percona, Oracle, and MariaDB to remove what was a major …