(Peter Zaitsev) Quite common task during schema review is to find the optimal data type for the column value – for example column is defined as INT but is it really needed or may be SMALLINT or even TINYINT will do instead. Does it contain any NULLs or it can be defined NOT NULL which reduces space

(Giuseppe Maxia) MySQL 5.1 has been GA for 4 months now, and I am sure that many people have been using the event scheduler.

(Evert Pot) Recently we started wondering what the most effective way is to index data based on Longitude and Latitude. Although we’re not yet seeing performance problems, we’re definitely anticipating them without an effective index. We’re using MySQL for anything mission critical, so (some of) thi

(Artem Russakovskii) If you, like me, are building or thinking of implementing a MySQL-powered application that has any need for prioritizing selecting certain data over other data, this article is for you.

(Giuseppe Maxia) What happens when the binary files of a fresh MySQL version is published on the web?

(Shlomi Noach) I get to hear that a lot: that LOCK TABLES with MyISAM is some sort of replacement for transactions; some model we can work with which gives us ‘transactional flavor’.

(Giuseppe Maxia) MySQL Sandbox 2.0.17 introduces a new item in the toolkit. sbtool is a multi-purpose tool for advanced tasks with MySQL sandboxes.

(Sean Hull) MySQL’s query cache is an impressive piece of engineering if sometimes misunderstood. Keeping it optimized and used efficiently can make a big difference in the overall throughput of your application, so it’s worth taking a look under the hood, understanding it, and then keeping it tune

(Phil Hildebrand) It’s always fun when you come into work and notice that one of your database monitors/graphs has changed from showing almost no row accesses/sec to 40,000 rows/sec in a matter of minutes. And then by lunch time they are showing 90,000 rows/sec. What’s up with that?

(Giuseppe Maxia) An interesting question came yesterday at the end of the MySQL workshop in Athens. An user has a server with about 40,000 tables, and the performance is not brilliant (oh really?). The reason is that there is an application that requires one or more new tables for any user, and the