(Sean Hull) If you’ve used relational databases for more than ten minutes, I hope you’ve heard of slow queries. Those are those pesky little gremlins that are slowing down your startup, and preventing scalability you so desperately need.

(Alexander Rubin) In my previous post about Hadoop and Impala I benchmarked performance of analytical queries in Impala.

(Shlomi Noach) If you’re running more than a few slaves in a replication topology, you might choose to use deeply nested replication: slaves replicating from other slaves at 2, 3 or even 4 levels. There are pros and cons to such topologies, discussed below.

(Fernando Ipar) This is the third post in our MySQL Fabric series. If you missed the previous two, we started with an overall introduction, and then a discussion of MySQL Fabric’s high-availability (HA) features. MySQL Fabric was RC when we started this series, but it went GA recently.

(Morgan Tocker) One interesting feature of MySQL, is that it supports a very large number of integer data types. From the MySQL manual:

(Peter Zaitsev) MySQL has status variables “questions” and “queries” which are rather close but also a bit different, making it confusing for many people. The manual describing it might not be very easy to understand:

(Shaun M. Thomas) PostgreSQL is a pretty good database, and I enjoy working with it. However, there is an implementation detail that not everyone knows about, which can drastically affect table performance. What is this mysterious feature? I am, of course, referring to foreign keys.

(Frederic Descamps) There is one new feature in MySQL 5.6 that didn’t get the attention it deserved (at least from me 😉 ) : “DATA DIRECTORY” for InnoDB tables.

(Alfranio Junior) MySQL Fabric is a distributed framework that has high availability and sharding as targets. It organizes the servers in groups which use the standard MySQL Replication to providing fault-tolerance.

(Joe Lennon) Recently while lecturing on HTML5 to a large group of students, I wanted to poll them and display their voting results, updating in real-time. I decided to quickly build a polling app for this purpose.