(Peter Zaitsev) One command, which few people realize exists is SHOW OPEN TABLES – it allows you to examine what tables do you have open right now:

(Vincent Danen) MySQL is one of the most popular database packages available for any platform. It makes its mark primarily being the back-end to web applications and sites and usually the defaults are fine for most installations.

(akojima) A couple of people have asked for a means to set the list of INSERT statements of a table from data already in an external file. While we havent implemented that feature in Workbench as of now, thats something that can be easily added as a Lua plugin.

(Kazuho Oku) One of the best practices on using MySQL is to avoid filesort. However there are cases where it is inevitable (e.g. ordering the result of fulltext search by modification date), and although in most cases we only the top N rows of sorted resultset are needed, MySQL does not implement to

(Ronald Bradford) As discussed previously in Options using MySQL pairs I have started evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of various open source options. This is an evaluation of Flipper, a product from Proven Scaling a MySQL consulting organization.

(Shlomi Noach) It is a known trick to use a session variables for dynamically counting/sequencing rows. The way to go is to SET a variable to zero, then use arithmetic within assignment to increment its value for each row in the SELECTed rows.

(Shikhar Kumar) Anyone who has programmed for any length of time has encountered the concepts of null and empty strings. They are not the same, and confusing the two can cause some serious problems. This article deals with these concepts in the context of PHP and MySQL.

(Gregory J. Haase) I have written a bit in the past about using INFORMATION_SCHEMA tables, and I use them extensively in stored procedures for performing regular maintenance operations. There are a great many clever and useful things you can do with them. However, recently I have been noticing some

(Shlomi Noach) In a GROUP BY query, MySQL may allow specifying non aggregated columns. For example, using MySQLs world database, I wish to get the number of countries per continent, along with a sample country:

(Giuseppe Maxia) I talked several times about partitioning usability. In my many tests of partitioning I found myself in need of generating list of partitions for a given range.