(Josh Berkus) Now, you’ll note in part I that I said that doing certain ALTER operations was “free”, in quotes. That’s because these operations aren’t actually worry-free; there’s the major issue of locking.

(Ronald Bradford) Using the MySQL 5.6 Performance Schema it is very easy to see what is actually running on your MySQL instance. No more sampling or installing software or worrying about disk I/O performance with techniques like SHOW PROCESSLIST, enabling the general query log or sniffing the TCP/IP

(Chris Travers) I will be getting back to the report writing in LedgerSMB next or the week after. I have an open source, PostgreSQL-based point of sale project I am hoping to make to a minimally useful version in the mean time.

(Ike Walker) MySQL introduced row-based replication in version 5.1, but I still use statement-based replication most of the time. One thing I like about statement-based replication is that I can delete a row from the master that doesn’t exist on the replica, without an error.

(Kirk Roybal) Sometimes you want to make some guesses about the size of data on disk long before you have the data in hand. Here’s a simple way to define a structure using a VALUES list, and then do some quick estimates of how big the resulting table would be when extrapolated to the expected number

(Ronald Bradford) Recently a client asked me how long it would take for an ALTER TABLE to complete. Generally the answer is “it depends”. While this was running on a production system I tried with the Performance Schema in MySQL 5.6 to work out some answer to this question.

(Michael Paquier) Based on the scripts developped in a previous post where a couple of hundred of Postgres servers were linked with replication cascading, let’s now have a look at the lag that cascading nodes have when creating several database objects.

(Morgan Tocker) In case you missed it, MySQL 5.6 added support for explicit partition selection. Since its release in MySQL 5.1, I have found partitioning an incredibly useful feature for aging out time-series data, and I plan to put this new syntax to work.

(Peter Boros) I’m looking forward to next week’s MySQL webinar with Robert Hodges, CEO of Continuent. We’ll be speaking on the topic “Multi-Data Center MySQL with Continuent Tungsten.”

(Rob Gravelle) For most applications, MySQL’s Round() function is more than adequate. It uses Half Away From ZERO rounding, whereby numbers whose last digit is 5 or greater are rounded up to the next significant digit away from zero. The problem with that – and many other rounding algorithms – is th