So here goes …

While there are already some blog postings from me at Oracle’s MySQL Enterprise Backup (MEB) team blog at https://blogs.oracle.com/mysqlenterprisebackup/, this blog is for my personal views and views outside of MEB.

Why the name with 2c.
The first challenge before you think of blogging is to convice yourself that maybe your views will have some value for a reader. The second is to find a name of the blog. Its not that I am fully convinced of the former but there are some things that need to be written and since the need is mine the fulfillment of the need should also come from me.

The name is to ensure to keep my words humble and respect views which may differ from mine; maybe conflicting and still right. Different people have differing views and this blog is just one view as seen by me for now.

The tagline …

Sphinx is a free, open-source search server that integrates nicely with MySQL. It provides a fast, scalable, and pluggable search framework. The Sphinx engine possesses a variety of tools enabling you to customize how searching/indexing interacts with or becomes a part of your environment.

Join me and Sphinx Search CEO/CTO Andrew Aksyonoff, the founder and creative force behind Sphinx, on Wednesday, November 20th at 10 a.m. PST as we discuss how to get started with Sphinx and seamlessly integrate it into your applications and MySQL. The title of our webinar is, “How to Optimally Configure Sphinx Search for MySQL” and you can register …

MariaDB 10.0 has SHOW EXPLAIN feature. It was coded by yours truly and first introduced about a year ago. Last release of MySQL 5.7 introduced EXPLAIN FOR CONNECTION, which looks rather similar to MariaDB’s SHOW EXPLAIN. I was wondering how these two compare.

The basics

The usage scenarios are similar. In both cases, you first need a connection id of a running query. It is typically obtained by running SHOW PROCESSLIST:

MariaDB [(none)]> show processlist;
+----+------+-----------+----------+---------+------+--------------+-----------------------------+----------+
| Id | User | Host      | db       | Command | Time | State        | Info                        | Progress | …

The call for participation for Percona Live MySQL Conference 2014 is still open. As part of the review committee, I will be looking at the proposals, and I hope to see many interesting ones.

There is a novelty in the submission form. In addition to tutorials and regular sessions, now you can submit proposals for lightning talks, to which I am particularly interested, as I have organized the lightning talks in the past two editions, and I am in charge to continue the tradition for the next one.

If you want to be a speaker at the conference, here are some tips to get your proposal accepted:

• Propose a topic that you know well;
• Take some time to write a well thought and meaningful proposal: nothing gets me faster to the rejection button than statements like “I want to talk about X, I will …

Translating theory to practice is never easy. Morgan gives us the right steps in a play environment to move from dev.mysql.com native MySQL rpm’s to the new MySQL yum repository. I thought I would try it out.

1. Confirming existing packages

A necessary step, however immediately I have more dependencies including Perl DBD (used in several utilities) including MHA.

$ sudo su -
$ rpm -qa | grep -i mysql
MySQL-devel-5.6.13-1.el6.x86_64
MySQL-test-5.6.13-1.el6.x86_64
MySQL-shared-compat-5.6.13-1.el6.x86_64
MySQL-server-5.6.13-1.el6.x86_64
perl-DBD-MySQL-4.013-3.el6.x86_64
MySQL-client-5.6.13-1.el6.x86_64
MySQL-embedded-5.6.13-1.el6.x86_64
MySQL-shared-5.6.13-1.el6.x86_64
mha4mysql-node-0.54-1.el5.noarch

A further trap in the more complex real-world environments, in my case the installation of Percona …

The old Greek word for "key" was KLEIS so someone who fears keys would be a kleidophobe, and a xenokleidophobe specifically fears foreign keys, which brings me to the MySQL 3.23 manual ...

5.4.5.1 Reasons NOT to Use Foreign Keys constraints
There are so many problems with foreign key constraints that we don't know where to start:
Foreign key constraints make life very complicated ...,
The speed impact is terrible ...,
There is also a need to hold locks on many more tables ...,
And so on.
And so on.

Of course those fierce words quietly disappeared from the manual some time after InnoDB came out with foreign key support in 2001. But since then the attempts to get foreign key support …

Drupal is one of the most popular open source CMS applications available – and it runs primarily on a MySQL backend.  Out of the box, the schema is well tuned and indexed.  However, there are some ways to tweak the default installation to get more out of the system right from start.  Similarly, there is a fair bit of hidden flexibility (especially in the latest version) in terms of database configuration.

In a free MySQL webinar on Wednesday, November 13th at 1pm EST, I’ll go over some of the improvements in Drupal 7 in terms of database connectivity and operation as well as profile the default installation from the database perspective.  I’ll also be covering some of the ways to optimize the default application and detailing some of the ways to benchmark your installation.

The title …

Dan McKinley (Etsy) wrote an [IMHO] insightful article Why MongoDB Never Worked at Etsy.

First off, it’s important to realise that it’s not a snipe at MongoDB – it’s a fine tool.

The lessons are related to mixing multiple databases in a deployment (administration and monitoring overhead) and the acknowledgement that issues of schema design, scalability and maintenance need attention regardless of which brand or technology you pick for your database. That comes back to the old insight that migrations are rarely worth it (regardless of what you migrate to what).

I think these are indeed important considerations as they have a major impact on the ongoing costs of your entire environment (production as well as development and testing) – these days we encounter the “we’re doing this part of our application using MongoDB” …

Percona Server 5.6.11-60.3 has introduced a new feature called Log Archiving for XtraDB. This feature makes copies of the old log files before they are overwritten, thus saving all the redo log for a write workload.

When log archiving is enabled, it duplicates all redo log writes in a separate set of files in addition to normal redo log writing, creating new files as necessary.

Archived log file name format is ib_log_archive_startlsn. The start LSN marks the log sequence number when the archive was started. An example of the archived log files should look like this:

ib_log_archive_00000000010145937920
ib_log_archive_00000000010196267520

In order to …

Dear MySQL users,

MySQL Connector/Net 6.8.1, a new version of the all-managed .NET driver for MySQL has been released. This is a beta release for 6.8.x and it's not recommended for production environments.

It is appropriate for use with MySQL server versions 5.0-5.6

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.)

The 6.8.1 version of MySQL Connector/Net has support for Entity Framework 6.0

The release is available to download at  …