(Alexey Stroganov) Last time I wrote about memory allocators and how they can affect MySQL performance in general. This time I would like to explore this topic from a bit different angle: What impact does the number of processor cores have on different memory allocators and what difference we will s

(Michael Paquier) PostgreSQL 9.3 comes with a pretty cool feature called materialized views. It has been created by Kevin Grittner and committed by the same person not so long ago.

(Rob Gravelle) Back in my Data Formatting, Working with XML Data in MySQL article, I described how to import XML-formatted data that was created using the mysqldump utility with the –xml flag. That solution relied on a combination of the MySQL LOAD_FILE() and ExtractValue() function.

(Ian Barwick) The HSTORE extension has been around quite a while, but until recently I’ve never found a situation where I can justify using it – here’s a quick writeup of a simple use-case.

(Mark Callaghan) MySQL 5.6 has a new option for innodb_flush_method. When O_DIRECT_NO_FSYNC is used then fsync is not done after writes. This was a response to feature request 45892. Unfortunately this option as implemented and documented is not safe to use with XFS.

(Peter Zaitsev) I was curious to check how Percona XtraDB Cluster behaves when it comes to MySQL replication latency — or better yet, call it data propagation latency. It was interesting to see whenever I can get stale data reads from other cluster nodes after write performed to some specific node.

(depesz) Some time ago I wrote a piece on speeding up dump/restore process using custom solution that was parallelizing process.

(Miguel Angel Nieto) The MySQL optimizer makes the decision of what execution plan to use based on the information provided by the storage engines. That information is not accurate in some engines like InnoDB and they are based in statistics calculations therefore sometimes some tune is needed.

(Falko Timme) MySQL replication is nice, however it can happen that it stops because of an error, and restoring a working replication can be hard – you need to set locks on the master to get a consistent MySQL dump, and during that time websites are not accessible. However there’s a way to make the

(Ernie Souhrada) I’ve never been a very big fan of MyISAM; I would argue that in most situations, any possible advantages to using MyISAM are far outweighed by the potential disadvantages and the strengths of InnoDB. However, up until MySQL 5.6, MyISAM was the only storage engine with support for fu