As with any open source software, anyone can download MySQL sources, build binaries for some platforms and distribute their own packages. So we have the official ones from Oracle, MariaDB, and Percona – the makers of MySQL and its forks respectively. There are also those distributed with operating systems or that are available for install from their standard repositories. Some people or groups also create packages out of the most recent versions of various software and make them available to the world. Finally, some mash up a vanilla MySQL with various patches creating even more options. What to choose?

Database is a piece of software that needs to be reliable in every way. It often holds the only complete and up-to-date copy of data. It may keep confidential information. It may be supporting an application where every minute of downtime costs a little fortune. Or perhaps it just needs to be as efficient as it can possibly be. There could …

Debian Linux (the underlying foundation of Ubuntu) manages the startup/shutdown of MySQL quite differently from the ways I am used to. I am a long-time user of both the MySQL binary provided by Red Hat/SuSE (along with Fedora and clones like CentOS and Oracle Enterprise Linux) and the official binary from mysql.com. After the successful restore of a cold backup, I started mysqld using the Debian provided init script. The script said that mysqld failed to start up, but in reality it did start up. Similarly, stopping mysqld fails.

The output below demonstrates the outputs and the behavior seen on a Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Server:

root:~# ps -ef | grep mysqld
root     20165 19926  0 15:12 pts/4    00:00:00 grep mysqld
root:~# /etc/init.d/mysql start
 * Starting MySQL database server mysqld                                            [fail]
root:~# ps -ef | grep …

“There are 10 types of people in the world — those who understand binary, and those who don’t.”

The term “binary” in MySQL has many different meanings. How many can you come up with? I have 6, but I am willing to believe there are more!

0) “Binary distribution” is the name for the package that contains a binary. Another use is “binary installation” but that’s pretty much the same usage pattern as “binary distribution”, so I won’t count “binary installation” as a separate usage.
1) “Server binary” or “client binary” is the actual program (mysqld, mysql).
2) “Binary format” is a compressed format. For example, DECIMAL is stored in a “binary format” — each group of nine digits is compressed into 4 bytes.
3) “Binary log” is the change log. You can argue that this is an extension of #3, because the binary log is a compressed …