There’s one thing that has always bugged me when I review configuration files. People always seem to want to set certain buffer settings to ridiculously high values without really understanding what they’re doing.

Case in point: sort_buffer_size.

The misconception seems to be that setting this value to a high number will always improve a servers performance because everything works better with more memory, right? For some variables (key_buffer, innodb_buffer_pool) maybe, but the entire length of a sort buffer is allocated when ORDER BY is used. In practice, I find it best to leave it at default and watch sort_merge_passes in your status counter to determine if you need to adjust this value. Also, adjust in small amounts.

…

The MySQL developer tools team announces 6.1.3 RC - the final release candidate for 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 is leveraging work from various teammates in MySQL Engineering by introducing a schema called "SYS" that provides simplified views on Performance Schema, Information Schema, and other areas. Special thanks to the server optimizer team, server runtime team, and Mark …

We deploy Galera Cluster (in MariaDB) for some clients, and innodb_flush_logs_on_trx_commit is one of the settings we’ve been playing with. The options according to the manual:

• =0 don’t write or flush at commit, write and flush once per second
• =1 write and flush at trx commit
• =2 write log, but only flush once per second

The flush (fsync) refers to the mechanism the filesystem uses to try and guarantee that written data is actually on the physical medium/device and not just in a buffer (of course cached RAID controllers, SANs and other devices use some different logic there, but it’s definitely written beyond the OS space).

In a non-cluster setup, you’d always want it to be =1 in order to be ACID compliant and that’s also InnoDB’s default. So far so good. For cluster setups, you could be more lenient with this as you require ACID on the cluster as …

Have you read the MySQL March Newsletter? Check it out to learn more about the Call of Papers for MySQL Connect @ OpenWorld 2014, MySQL in action in the finance, retail and channel management sectors, as well as numerous technical tips written by MySQL experts at Oracle and in the community. The highlights in this edition include:

• Submit Sessions for MySQL Connect @ OpenWorld 2014
  
• MySQL Connector/NET 6.8.3 Available as Official MySQL NuGet Packages
  
• New Case Studies: MySQL in Action in Finance, Retail, and Channel Management
  
• New White Paper: Guide to the MySQL Workbench Migration Wizard: From Microsoft SQL Server to MySQL
• Featured Video: How to Export Your Database with MySQL for Visual Studio
  
• Blog: Today's Practical Use Case for …

I’m looking forward to Wednesday’s joint webinar on MySQL clustering technologies with Matt Aslett, research director of data management and analytics over at 451 Research. We’ll be participating in a live, in-depth discussion of MySQL Clustering for High Availability and Scalability.

Matt will present an overview of the trends driving adoption of clustering technology. He’ll also discuss the key technologies and criteria that developers and administrators need to consider when thinking about clustering, in order to improve their likelihood of success.

For my part, I’ll be focusing on a more technical overview of benefits and drawbacks of different clustering …

MySQL Fabric is a new framework that adds High Availability (HA) and/or scaling-out for MySQL. This is the second in a series of posts on the new MySQL Fabric framework; the first article (MySQL Fabric – adding High Availability to MySQL) explained how MySQL Fabric can deliver HA and then stepped through all of the steps to configure and use it.

This post focuses on using MySQL Fabric to scale out both reads and writes across multiple MySQL Servers. It starts with an introduction to scaling out (by partitioning/sharding data) and how MySQL Fabric achieves it before going on to work through a full example of configuring sharding across a farm of MySQL Servers together with the code that the application developer needs to …

In my previous post I’ve showed some new MySQL 5.6 features which can be very helpful when creating geo-enabled applications. In this post I will show how we can obtain open-source GIS data, convert it to MySQL and use it in our GEO-enabled applications. I will also present at the upcoming Percona Live conference on this topic.

Data sources (US)

For the U.S. we may look at 2 major data sources:

1. ZIP codes with latitude, longitude and zip code boundaries (polygon). This can be downloaded from the U.S. Census website: …

To create dynamic web pages, you can use PHP, a server-side, HTML-embedded scripting language. PHP is available for most operating systems and can access the MySQL database. PHP provides MySQL API extensions, MySQL Improved Extension and MySQL Functions.

To learn more about using MySQL and PHP, you can consult the MySQL and PHP reference manual. You can also take the MySQL and PHP: Developing Dynamic WebApplications training course.

Through a hands-on approach, this 4-day instructor-led course …

I needed to test the new server audit plug-in on latest MariaDB 10.0.9
More info about that handy plug in you may find here : http://www.skysql.com/downloads/mariadb-audit-plugin
Take a moment to read the info, along with that nice blog : http://www.skysql.com/blogs/ralf-gebhardt/activating-auditing-mariadb-and-mysql-5-minutes

In short:

root@mariadb-10.0.9:[Mon Mar 24 07:51:54][/tmp/]$ lftp http://ftp.igh.cnrs.fr/pub/mariadb/mariadb-10.0.9/yum/
cd ok, cwd=/pub/mariadb/mariadb-10.0.9/yum                                   
lftp ftp.igh.cnrs.fr:/pub/mariadb/mariadb-10.0.9/yum> bookmark add mariadb-10.0.9
lftp ftp.igh.cnrs.fr:/pub/mariadb/mariadb-10.0.9/yum> ls
drwxr-xr-x  --  ..                   
drwxr-xr-x            - …

I will be presenting at Percona Live 2014 and I’m excited to share and discuss the latest and greatest features and improvements that we have made to MySQL/InnoDB in 5.7. Great performance improvements, there are some new exciting compression features that we are working on,  GIS support,  temporary table performance etc.. There is a long list. Also, we are always interested to hear about user issues and priorities so that we can address them and/or work them into our plan. Your feedback is very important for us, if you want to influence the direction of InnoDB development then you need to talk to me .