(Maciej Dobrzanski) The other day I worked on a case of what turned out to be a problem with poor data locality or a data fragmentation problem if you will. I tought that it would make a good article as it was a great demonstration of how badly it can affect MySQL performance.

(Leo Hsu and Regina Obe) One of PostgreSQL’s nice features is its great support for temporal data. In fact it probably has the best support for temporal data than any other database. We’ll see more of this power in PostgreSQL 9.2 with the introduction of date time range types.

(Kedar) At times you’ll find yourself responsible for generating test data for newly created tables for testing or sampling purpose. There are tools that will generate random data for you but they’re not free. At-times you’ll write scripts to generate data but those will be table specific.

(Shlomi Noach) MySQL’s Row Based Replication (RBR) succeeds (though not replaces) Statement Based Replication (SBR), as of version 5.1.

(Leo Hsu and Regina Obe) In last article Finding Contiguous primary keys we detailed one of many ways of finding continuous ranges in data, but the approach would only work on higher-end dbs like Oracle 11G, SQL Server 2012, and PostgreSQL 8.4+. Oracle you’d have to replace the EXCEPT I think with M

(Gavin Towey) The slow query log is one of the most misused features of MySQL. I say this because I often talk to people who are using it, but they’re not getting everything they could from it. It’s an awesomely powerful source of information! When used correctly it can make performance optimizati

(Peter Zaitsev) Today I was looking at the ALTER TABLE performance with fast index creation and without it with different buffer pool sizes. Results are pretty interesting. I used modified Sysbench table for these tests because original table as initially created only has index on column K which ini

(Jack Wallen) You can back up your MySQL database using the built-in dump tool, but the second you do that backup is out of date. Since so many companies and web-based tools rely heavily on databases, it’s crucial that those databases are as up-to-date as possible.

(Ernie Souhrada) The MySQL manual tells us that regardless of whether or not we use gSET FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS=0 before making schema changes, InnoDB will not allow a column referenced by a foreign key constraint to be modified in such a way that the foreign key will reference a column with a mismat

(Shlomi Noach) We’re used to Cold, Warm and Hot backups. This scale of three temperatures does not quite reflect the impact of backups on your MySQL database.