This weekend, on 1-2 February, FOSDEM 2014 will take place in Brussels, Belgium.
There will be MySQL talks on Saturday in the MySQL Devroom and a MySQL Community dinner afterward.

30 people have already signed up for the community dinner, we’re almost at the amount of people from last year.

Last orders for the MySQL Community dinner will be accepted on Wednesday 29 January, so if you plan to attend, make sure to buy your tickets now. After that day, we won’t be able to add more people to the list.

I also wanted to thank the sponsors. Without them, this community dinner would not have been made …

The MySQL manual says: "In standard SQL, a query that includes a GROUP BY clause cannot refer to nonaggregated columns in the select list that are not named in the GROUP BY clause."

I got questioned about that last week, and this week I see that there's a proposed change in behaviour for MySQL 5.7, so I guess it's a good time to try to figure out what's going on in this part of the world.

I checked the manuals for most current DBMSs and confirmed that the ONLY_FULL_GROUP_BY kind of behaviour is required by DB2, …

I know it was officially announced Monday, but I just wanted to take a moment and let everyone know MariaDB Enterprise 1.0 is now available, in case you missed the previous article.

What does MariaDB Enterprise consist of?

“MariaDB Enterprise is composed of several components including MariaDB Manager, which is a set of management tools and an API with which you can easily provision, monitor, and manage a highly available MariaDB Galera Cluster for multi-master, synchronous replication. Galera is a powerful technology that can eliminate single points of failure for your database infrastructure, but it is relatively new and can be a challenge to configure for administrators who aren’t familiar with it.”

https://mariadb.com/..MariaDB Enterprise – Getting Started …

Since union queries were introduced in MySQL 4.0.0, they have been processed by executing each part of the union and adding the result to a temporary table. Then a final query block is executed that, if needed, filters out duplicates, do global ordering and limit the number of output rows. The good thing about this method is that it works for all union queries. The bad thing is that it always uses a temporary table, even in the really simple cases, and there’s always an extra query block to execute, even if there’s no sorting and no duplicate filtering.

As of MySQL 5.7.3, UNION ALL doesn’t use temporary tables unless needed for sorting. The result of each part of the union will be sent directly back to the client, without waiting in a temporary table or passing through an extra query block. When 5.7.3 came out, Facebook (who filed the feature request for …

There are many blog posts already written on topics related to “MySQL server memory usage,” but nevertheless there are some who still get confused when troubleshooting issues associated with memory usage for MySQL. As a Percona support engineer, I’m seeing many issues regularly related to heavy server loads – OR OOM killer got invoked and killed MySQL server due to high Memory usage… OR with a question like: “I don’t know why mysql is taking so much memory. How do I find where exactly memory is allocated? please help!”

There are many ways to check memory consumption of MySQL. So, I’m just trying here to explain it by combining all details that I know of in this post.

• Check memory related Global/Session variables.

If you are using …

Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona XtraBackup 2.1.7 on January 24th, 2014. Downloads are available from our download site here and Percona Software Repositories.

This release is the current GA (Generally Available) stable release in the 2.1 series. Percona XtraBackup is an open source, free MySQL hot backup software that performs non-blocking backups for InnoDB and XtraDB databases. Percona XtraBackup is an open source, free MySQL hot backup software that performs non-blocking …

By default, for every client connection the MySQL server spawns a separate thread which will process all statements for this connection. This is the ‘one-thread-per-connection’ model. It’s simple and efficient until some number of connections N is reached. After this point performance of the MySQL server will degrade, mostly due to various contentions caused by N threads that are trying to access shared resources: either system ones like CPU, IO, memory or MySQL specific: structures/locks/etc. To keep the system stable and avoid degradation in the performance we need to limit the number of active threads, and at the same time we do not want to limit number of the client connections. The ‘Thread Pool’ model helps us to achieve that. It allows mapping N client connections to M number of active threads (actually performing work) while demonstrate a smooth and stable throughput for the MySQL server.

There are several implementations of …

As author of MySQL JSON functions I am also interested in how development goes in another parties. JSON functions and operators in PostgreSQL, indeed, have great features. Some of them, such as operators, I can not do using UDF functions only. But lets see how these functions are interchangeable.

Note: all PostgreSQL examples were taken from PostgreSQL documentation.
First topic is syntax sugar.

Configuring the character set for MySQL is confusing. It is so confusing that there are roughly 25 different places to configure a character set. Don’t believe me? Add them up. The real number may be closer to 30. I realize a lot of this is due to the age of MySQL and the extent of it’s character set support. MySQL does support character set configuration in many different places which is usually a good thing.

I often complain about defaults that make no sense like lock_wait_timeout=1 year. In this case there is a default that makes absolutely no sense to me. The manual says that select into outfile is the complement of load data infile. It isn’t completely true. They differ in one key aspect, the default character set!. By default select into outfile now does the right thing by using binary character set and dumping the raw bytes to the file. Load data infile defaults to the value of the character_set_database variable which defaults …

The MySQL developer tools team is pleased to announce 6.1 Beta 1 - the start of the public beta testing phase of MySQL Workbench 6.1

MySQL Workbench 6.1 is the upcoming major update for the official MySQL graphical development tool.
Introducing over 30 new features, this version has many significant enhancement focusing on real-time performance assessment and analysis from the SQL statement level to server internals and file IO. You'll see this in additions to the SQL Editor as well as new dashboard visualization and reporting that takes advantage of MySQL Server 5.6 and 5.7 Performance Schema, and enhancements to the MySQL Explain Plans.

Additionally Workbench 6.1 this leveraging work from various teammates in MySQL Engineering in introducing a schema called "SYS" that provides simplified views on Performance Schema, Information Schema, and other areas.
Special thanks to the server optimizer team, …