(Mark Leith) I’ve seen a number of solutions for finding long running transactions or sessions within InnoDB / MySQL now. Every single one of them has (in the past by necessity) been implemented as a script (other than one, more on that one later) that is either invoked manually, or via some cron jo

(Ovais Tariq) The most basic and most oft-repeated task that a DBA has to accomplish is to look at slow logs and filter out queries that are suboptimal, that consume lots of unnecessary resources and that hence slow down the database server.

(Mohammed Salih) Here is a MySQL backup script which can take table by table backups (individual backup files of each table of each database) in a compressed format. It also provides an automatic rotation of old backup files. The backup script handles innodb and myisam tables separately.

(0v34c10ck) When an application asks MySQL for the Primary Key of a table, there are several ways to go about doing this. A fast way would be to use these statements:

(Ovais Tariq) LVM (Logical Volume Management) is a very important tool to have in the toolkit of a MySQL DBA. It allows you to create and extend logical volumes on the fly. This allows me to, say, add another disk and extend a partition effortlessly.

(Mark Leith) Baron pointed to two really good articles recently by Brendan Gregg on Filesystem Latency (part1 / part2), that I too would recommend everybody read.

(Sheeri Cabral) Shlomi blogged over the weekend about DATETIME vs. TIMESTAMP, and hit all the major differences, except one extremely important one that very few people know about (in my opinion).

(Shlomi Noach) They both look the same, have roughly the same use. Nevertheless, they differ in many respects. I’ll note the difference, and note a few pitfalls and peculiarities.

(Adam Douglas) I will explain how to convert a DATETIME (data type) value in Microsoft SQL Server to Unix timestamp and how to convert Unix timestamp to DATETIME. A Unix timestamp is a integer value of seconds since January 1, 1970 at midnight.

(Ulf Wendel) While Andrey is busy implementing partitioned replication infrastructure code for the PHP replication and load balancing plugin (PECL/mysqlnd_ms), I continued my search for ideas to steal.