(Ike Walker) Last week I had to update several million rows in a single MySQL table. Rather that executing the update directly in the database, I decided to use common_schema’s split() function.

(Morgan Tocker) In the MySQL team, we are currently discussing deprecating several of the SQL mode options which are used by mysqldump to change the output format. From the mysqldump command:

(Justin Swanhart) One of the great features of Shard-Query is the ability to use MySQL proxy to access resultsets transparently. While this is a great tool, many people have expressed reservations about using MySQL Proxy, an alpha component in their production environment.

(Stephane Combaudon) From time to time people wonder how to implement roles in MySQL. This can be useful for companies having to deal with many user accounts or for companies with tight security requirements (PCI or HIPAA for instance).

(Baron Schwartz) The other day we were doing some peer review on a schema change at VividCortex and the topic of character set, column length, and the potential downsides of using utf8 came up.

(Muhammad Irfan) DBAs often encounter situations where they need to kill queries to ensure there are no long-running queries on a MySQL server that would impact performance. Long-running queries can be the result of many factors.

(Fernando Laudares and George O. Lorch III) If you use Percona Server 5.5 and you have configured it to use multiple buffer pool instances than sooner or later you’ll see the following lines on the server’s error log and chances are you’ll be worried about them:

(John Potocny) Recently, one of our customers reached out to us about a problem they were having trouble diagnosing – they noticed that every once in a while, it took their MySQL server a few seconds to initialize a client connection. They had figured out that the issue was a missing hosts entry for

(Shinguz) MySQL Enterprise Backup (MEB) has the capability to make real incremental (differential and cumulative?) backups. The actual releases are quite cool and you should really look at it…

(Alexander Rubin) MySQL introduced the Event Scheduler in version 5.1.6. The Event Scheduler is a MySQL-level “cron job”, which will run events inside MySQL. Up until now, this was not a very popular feature, however, it has gotten more popular since the adoption of Amazon RDS – as well as similar M