(Shlomi Noach) Risking some flames, I’d like to suggest only two options for choosing PRIMARY KEYs for InnoDB tables. I suggest they should cover 99% (throwing numbers around) of cases.

(Sean Hull) Character sets are ways of storing string or text data in a database. Since the world’s languages use different character sets for their writing systems, a database must support many different types of character sets to store information in those languages. For Western European languages

(Quassnoi) Answering questions asked on the site.

(Baron Schwartz) I recently mentioned a few of the big “non-starter” limitations Postgres has overcome for specific use cases. I decided to write a series of blog posts on MySQL’s unsolved severe limitations. I mean limitations that really hobble it for major, important needs — not in areas where it

(Shinguz) When you are working with MyISAM tables MySQL provides a feature called the Midpoint Insertion Strategy. You can enable it with the parameter key_cache_division_limit.

(Sean Hull) Benchmarking can be a very revealing process. It can be used to isolate performance problems, and drill down to specific bottlenecks. More importantly, it can be used to compare different servers in your environment, so you have an expectation of performance from those servers, before yo

(depesz) Some time ago Joshua Tolley described how to reduce bloat from tables without locking (well, some locks are there, but very short, and not really intrusive).

(Peter Zaitsev) Some Applications need to store some transient data which is frequently regenerated and MEMORY table look like a very good match for this sort of tasks. Unfortunately this will bite when you will be looking to add Replication to your environment as MEMORY tables do not play well with

(Rob Gravelle) In data modeling, explaining how each table links to another is known as cardinality. Knowing how to establish table cardinality is a key skill in database design because it can identify areas where the normalization process may have gone awry. This article looks at each relationship

(Geert Vanderkelen) This post describes how to make a custom cursor returning rows as dictionaries using MySQL Connctor/Python v0.2 (or later).