(Sean Hull) MySQL has some powerful replication technology. It can be configured to replicate everything, or subsets of schemas or even individual tables. Those slave databases can themselves be masters as well, feeding still more databases a stream of transactions from the master.

(Peter Zaitsev) When doing performance analyzes you often would want to see 95 percentile, 99 percentile and similar values. The “average” is the evil of performance optimization and often as helpful as “average patient temperature in the hospital”.

(Leo Hsu and Regina Obe) In this third part of our PLPGSQL Quick Guide series, we shall delve into writing recursive functions. Before we do that, we shall demonstrate a very important but trivial feature in PostgreSQL and that is the RAISE NOTICE feature. There are more elegant ways of debugging, b

(Peter Zaitsev) Working with number of hosting providers I always wonder how do they manage to keep things up given MySQL gives you so little ways to really restrict how much resources single user can consume. I have written over a year ago about 10+ ways to crash or overload MySQL and since that pe

(Kristian Nielsen) Selecting rows holding group-wise maximum is a favorite problem of mine, but one which only rarely pops up. But for some reason, after my last blog post on the subject, it seems to be mentioned almost daily around here.

(Peter Zaitsev) I have written before – MyISAM Does Not Scale, or it does quite well – two main things stopping you is table locks and global mutex on the KeyCache.

(Shlomi Noach) A set of useful queries on INFORMATION_SCHEMA follows. These queries can be used when approaching a new database, to learn about some of its properties, or they can be regularly used on an existing schema, so as to verify its integrity.

(Phil Hildebrand) Sometimes I amaze myself in my capacity to make assumptions about how things should work, especially when it comes to test plans… ( You know what happens when we assume, right? )

(Barzan “Tony” Antal) Fine-tuning the settings of servers in general requires a strong grasp of the inner workings of the servers and lots of patience. Did we mention patience? Yup, we did. Its really important to understand that there are no tips that work for all kinds of setups. But thankfully we

(Peter Zaitsev) INFORMATION_SCHEMA, in particular by favorite TABLES table is not only helpful to understand tables you have on the system, but I have also found it to be very helpful as a scripting language for variety of database administration tasks. It can be more straightforward compared to usi