Whenever I start a new project with MySQL or MariaDB I am tempted to jump in and start creating my schema and tables with nothing more than a basic outline of the requirements. Often the justification I give myself is that the sooner I have something up and running, the better off I'll be, and besides, there will be plenty of time to sort things out later. Even when I am absolutely sure my ad-hoc schema is only for "development purposes" and will "never ever be used in production" it often is.

A lot of grief can be avoided if time is taken right at the start, before any tables are defined, to plan. This is big picture time and every stakeholder, from IT to the developers to management and even to marketing, needs to be involved. If for no other reason than to set expectations.

Right at the start, everyone involved in the project needs to know that there is no perfect data definition, and no one …

The most basic and most oft-repeated task that a DBA has to accomplish is to look at slow logs and filter out queries that are suboptimal, that consume lots of unnecessary resources and that hence slow down the database server. This post looks at why and how VIEWs can help against such suboptimal operations.

This is Zak Greant's weekly report on his activities for the Mozilla Foundation from December 29th, 2008 to January 4th, 2009.

Overview

Another week of the Christmas and New Year holidays with many of my Mozilla colleagues unavailable. As with the previous week, I focused on 2009 program development and engagement.

The program development work was in the form of brainstorming, planning and research for upcoming 2009 Mozilla activities.

The engagement work focused on participating in the Mozilla blogorama. I kept up with Planet Mozilla, commented on blog posts I found interesting and continued a series of lightweight blog posts.

More details on both activities follow:

Program Development

I finished drafting a new statement of work and sent this to …

My last post on the replication poll was apparently lost from Planet MySQL. If you're interested, I commented on the replication poll, our future plans, and how they were affected by the poll.

We've been running replication poll and we've got some answers, so I thought I would comment a little on the results of the poll and what our future plans with respect to replication is as a result of the feedback. As I commented in the previous post, there are some items that require a significant development effort, but the feedback we got helps us to prioritize.

The top five items from the poll above stands out, so I thought that I would comment on each of them in turn. The results of the poll were (when this post were written):