This is the translation of an article from my german language blog. It is not a literal translation, but has been amended and changed a bit to take more recent information into account.

It started out as a discussion within the german language MySQL group in USENET. There the eternal question came up why phpMyAdmin gets no love at all from the helpers and regulars in that group. My answer was:

phpMyAdmin (PMA) like many other GUI tools for MySQL has a number of limitations. For a web tool such as PMA these come from its operating principles and can hardly be changed. But let's start at the beginning:

In MYSQL the connection is a special context or scope for many things. At least the following things are part of the connection scope:

• Transactions. A disconnect implies a ROLLBACK.
…

Someone pointed this out to me the other day. Look at the comment on the revision:

Merge community up to enterprise, thus ending the community-server adventure.

A while ago I posted about a comment a Sun performance engineer made about a scalable replacement for InnoDB. At the time, I did not believe it referred to Falcon. In hindsight, it seems even clearer that the Sun performance experts were already working hard on InnoDB itself.

Sun’s engineers have shown that they can produce great results when they really take the problems seriously. And I’m sure that InnoDB’s performance has untapped potential we don’t see right now. However, it does not follow that their work on InnoDB is what was meant by a scalable replacement for InnoDB. Or does it?

General-purpose MVCC transactional storage engines with row-level locking, whatever their performance and scaling characteristics in …

I’ve packaged up and released version 1.1.2 of the Cacti templates I’ve written for MySQL, Apache, memcached, nginx etc.

Anyone who would like to help write documentation (or do anything else, for that matter) is welcomed to participate. I’ll give commit access at the drop of a hat.

Changelog:

2009-05-07: version 1.1.2

        * The parsing code did not handle InnoDB plugin / XtraDB (issue 52).
        * The servername was hardcoded in ss_get_by_ssh.php (issue 57).
        * Added Handler_ graphs (issue 47).
        * Config files can be used instead of editing the .php file (issue 39).
        * binary log space is now calculated without a MySQL query (issue 48).
        * There was no easy way to force inputs to be filled (issue 45).
        * Some graphs were partially hidden without --lower-limit (issue 43).
        * Flipped some elements across the …

As I was driving with a colleague in California a couple of weeks ago during the conference, the topic of conversation turned to the notion that Percona and the rest of the MySQL community really need the presence of a central entity that provides a recognized home for the MySQL server. The conversation went something like “I was talking to so-and-so, and he said, you know, you guys really need Sun/MySQL, because without the mother ship, things will fall apart and your own business will fail.”

I happen to believe this is FUD, and that the reverse might actually be true. (This is one reason why we’re competing head-on with MySQL.) Having a “mother ship” is in the long run, a very complex scenario to fully understand. There are all sorts of causes and effects that play out in subtle ways. I honestly doubt anyone can really …

Maatkit version 3519 is ready for download. There are a lot of changes in this release, many of which are incompatible with previous releases. There are also a lot of important new features. Read on for the details.

First, thanks to everyone who contributed to this month’s release. A lot of people have jumped into Maatkit and started committing code. I attribute this to deliberately forcing a more open policy with decisions being made on the mailing list, rather than the former policy of “Percona pays for development, so they have more say than you do” — a snobby and ill-advised way to treat an open-source project. If you are interested in contributing to Maatkit, please ask. Subversion commit rights are being handed out willy-nilly. It’s great!

Here’s a synopsis of this …

MySQL provides a SOUNDEX() function, which returns the soundex of a given string. For details, refer to the manual, but to put it simply, it allows you to compare strings based on how they sound, hence letting you do proximity searches on your database. If you’re just querying for a word, it’s usage is pretty […]

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Peter wrote about this recently, but I don’t know if it was really clear what was going on.

Point One: Sphinx can be contacted by the MySQL protocol. Not “as a MySQL storage engine.” Not “from MySQL.” It understands the MySQL protocol itself. So from the protocol point of view, the Sphinx search daemon can look just like a MySQL server.

Point Two: Sphinx understands a SQL-like query language. Don’t be fooled. You’re not writing SQL. It just looks like you are.

Point Three: Because of point One and point Two, you can use the mysql command-line client program to talk directly to Sphinx, with absolutely no MySQL server anywhere in sight. This also means you can connect …

Cacti is a great tool for collecting information about systems and graphing it. However, it likes to use SNMP, and SNMP is often not desirable. Instead, I often see the need for a method that is:

• Secure. Use trusted, well-known, encrypted communication. Do not open up new ports.
• Zero install on the monitored system.
• As little installation or modification on the monitoring system as possible.

Over the last several years, I’ve slowly created more and more software to create Cacti graphs via standard POSIX command-line utilities over SSH with key-pair authentication. (I’ve also created similar software for Nagios, but that’s another matter.) The major problem with the work I’ve done is that it’s totally un-publicized.

The system works by passing command-line arguments to a local PHP script like any other Cacti script. This …

The slides for my session on Maatkit at the MySQL Conference are uploaded. They should appear on the speaker presentation files page, but I have heard that it can take a few days. Please let me know if they’re not there by May 1, 2009.

I did not have time to plow through everything in the slides. (I deliberately prepared more material than I could cover, and just stopped when I ran out of time.) Alas, I did not remember to take my voice recorder that day, so I have no audio to share with you!