Dear MySQL Family,

Soon before Christmas I read these lines Shawn Green (one of our most talented Support Engineer) had written about his wife at Amie’s lottery chances were better..:

What can you do when you are one of a 1000 people out of the 7.5 billion on the planet who have been diagnosed with this particular disease. Imagine having your guts knotted up as though you had Crohn’s disease, add to that fever and aches as though you had flu, add to this the feeling that you have the arthritic joints of a 80 year old and you are 42… Now you have a idea of what T.R.A.P.S syndrome is like. Now imagine having cancer as well. The money that is being raised is going to offset the cost of Mayo clinic in Minnesota…as well as current medical bills. We have discovered that her cancer has spread..but still treatable. We are home finally and will find out when next surgery …

It is no secret that Spil Games is a heavy user of Sphinx Search. We use it in many ways including game-search, profile-search and since a few months ago to even build our category and subcategory listings. In all cases we do not use it as an extension of MySQL but rather as a standalone […]

The post How we tamed Sphinx Search appeared first on Spil Games Engineering.

A question often comes when talking about indexing: should we use multiple column indexes or multiple indexes on single columns? Peter Zaitsev wrote about it back in 2008 and the conclusion then was that a multiple column index is most often the best solution. But with all the recent optimizer improvements, is there anything different with MySQL 5.6?

Setup

For this test, we will use these 2 tables (same structure as in Peter’s post):

CREATE TABLE t1000merge (
  id int not null auto_increment primary key,
  i int(11) NOT NULL,
  j int(11) NOT NULL,
  val char(10) NOT NULL,
  KEY i (i),
  KEY j (j)
) ENGINE=InnoDB;
CREATE TABLE t1000idx2 (
  id int not null auto_increment primary key,
  i int(11) NOT NULL,
  j int(11) NOT NULL,
  val char(10) NOT NULL,
  KEY ij (i,j)
) ENGINE=InnoDB;

Tables were …

I've blogged before about how complicated setting up SSL with MySQL can be. Since then many bugs have been fixed related to SSL.

But still many people are using unencrypted connections for replication and client connections.

This could be because of possible performance degradation. But then it could be used for only the admin connections.

It could also be because they already use SSH or VPN.

But for many it's because they think it's complicated. This is not necessary. I've created mysslgen which makes it easier to setup SSL. Just run mysslgen.py and then the CA, server and client certificates and keys will be generated for you. The most difficult part it to get python 3.3 or python 2.7 to run on CentOS/RHEL/OEL 6.
If you …

This is a HOWTO about installing MariaDB Galera Cluster on Debian/Ubuntu.
It is because a lot of people had problems installing MariaDB Galera Cluster.
In the end elenst from #maria on freenode forced me to write a Howto :)
You will find out, installing MariaDB Galera Cluster is in fact quite easy and some kind of boring in the end.
This Howto is written (tested) on Debian 7.1 (Wheezy) and Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise).

What we need

In our setup we assume 3 nodes (node01, node02, node03) with one interface.
We assume following IP addresses: 172.16.8.5, 172.16.8.6 and 172.16.8.4. We need three packages installed on all nodes:

• rsync
• galera
• mariadb-galera-server

As Galera does not ship with the distribution repositories, go for the …

In many parts of the MySQL world, whether you have users, developers or administrators of MySQL, the season holidays are for family, relax, prayers, travel, or they are simply a moment where you can enjoy what you like or care most about.

For me, this time is dedicated to my family, but also to deeper thoughts around the strategies to adopt in short and long term. My work nowadays, as the work of many others, is ruled by quick decisions, by the "time to market” - whatever “market" means in a specific context. Decisions must be made in meetings that are time-boxed in one hour or even less. In the end, you accumulate so much work and high priority tasks that you do not have enough time to prepare the topics adequately.

I thought I could summarise my thoughts for the past year and for the near future, from a technical and from a business perspective.

A transient 2013To me, 2013 was a transient …

Table structures are stored in .frm files and in the InnoDB Data Dictionary. Sometimes, usually in data recovery issues, we need to recover those structures to be able to find the lost data or just to recreate the tables.

There are different ways to do it and we’ve already written about it in this blog. For example, we can use the data recovery tools to recover table structures from InnoDB Dictionary or from the .frm files using a MySQL Server. This blog post will be an update of that last one. I will show you how to easily recover the structure from a .frm file and in some cases even …

I’ve worked with every release of Microsoft Excel, and I know it takes effort to keep up to date with certain releases. Clearly, the Data Analysis eXpression (DAX) Language introduced in Excel 2010 went unnoticed by many, which was sad. DAX is truly a powerful extension to the analytical and modeling approaches in Microsoft Excel.

I’d like to recommend Microsoft Excel 2013 Building Data Models with PowerPivot to those who haven’t learned how to use DAX in Excel 2010, 2011, or 2013. DAX works with tables but if you don’t use tables, I guess you can skip DAX …

The year is almost at its end. Looking back at the past year I think it was a good year for MySQL. The 5.6 release was released in February and has been proven to be a very good release. There were many folks who reported bugs, which is good as this means they care about the product. But MySQL is not only a product, its a large ecosystem. One of the big players in the ecosystem is Oracle and this year they really participated in the MySQL community by having their engineers attend conferences which were not organized by Oracle (Like Percona Live and FOSDEM).
 
This year I couldn't attend the MySQL Connect and Percona Live conferences, but I hope to be able to attend in 2014 again. I did attend FOSDEM, which is a really nice (and different) conference.

For MariaDB it also was an interesting year as a number of  Linux distributions and customers switched from MySQL to MariaDB (and sometimes back again). I wonder …

Today new version of JSON UDF functions: 0.3.0 was released. This is major release which contains new functionality. You can download functions from the MySQL Labs website.

What was added?

Functions JSON_EXTRACT, JSON_CONTAINS_KEY, JSON_APPEND, JSON_REMOVE, JSON_REPLACE, JSON_SET now accept both string and integer arguments as array indexes. (Bug #70393/17491709)

Now syntax JSON_EXTRACT(doc, 'key', 1); is accepted.

New function JSON_SAFE_MERGE checks JSON documents for validity before merging them. In addition JSON_MERGE now merges valid documents, having array as root element. (Bug #70575/17583568)

JSON_VALID now accepts array as a root element of the JSON document (Bug #70567/17583282)

Also this release contains following bug fixes:

71050/17882710 …