(Ronald Bradford) Recently on a client site I had to fight the pain of having no way to confirm loss of data integrity when optimizing data types. Due to MySQL’s ability to perform silent conversion of data, when converting a number of columns we enabled sql_mode to catch any truncations as errors.

(Diego Medina) While I hope the MySQL Proxy never crashes, it will happen, there will be some strange (or maybe not so strange) usage or workload and it will die.

(Sveta Smirnova) Sometimes you need to run EXPLAIN on long running queries. Most time EXPLAIN takes few seconds, but sometimes it looks like it executes query itself instead of using statistic.

(Vadim) Sometimes when you do profiling you can see number like this in timestamps. Periodically in our patches there was Query_time: 18446744073709550.000 in slow.log file (well, it was fixed recently, but still appears in other places).

(Johan Andersson) There are various setups and solutions to solve the problem of having redundant mysql masters and scaling writes on them. MySQL Cluster can be an alternative. Here is why and how:

(Baron Schwartz) I see a lot of people filtering replication with binlog-do-db, binlog-ignore-db, replicate-do-db, and replicate-ignore-db. Although there are uses for these, they are dangerous and in my opinion, they are overused. For many cases, there’s a safer alternative.

(Shlomi Noach) The two server variables, report_host and report_port, are not commonly used. One of the reasons, I suspect, is that they do not appear in any of the standard .cnf files provided with a MySQL installation.

(Artem Russakovskii) A question I recently saw on Stack Overflow titled Faster way to delete matching [database] rows? prompted me to organize my thoughts and observations on the subject and quickly jot them down here.

(Ladislav Nevery) Recently I needed to create a database application and my Database server choice was MySql. It’s free and can run on Linux with great uptimes. The problem is that I needed Windows Mobile version and on Windows clients, you need to install a special ODBC driver called “MySql Connect

(Michael McLaughlin) I finally got the magic trick to find the explain plan for a query in MySQL, but chagrined to find out that you can’t explain the cost or execution of INSERT, UPDATE or DELETE statements. This blog shows you how to get the execution and execution plan for a query and the error w