(Rob Young) During my years as a Developer/DBA hearing the words “customizable” or “extensible” always brought a slight smile to my face, particularly when they were used in conjunction with a software sales pitch or evaluation. In fact, more often than not, while presented as product features, thes

(Alex Polishchuk and Michael Procopio) Wouldn’t it great to have a database to store all your data, not have to pay for the software licensing and get a low annual support cost per machine not per CPU, or users, or company revenue? Absolutely perfect! Better yet, such things do exist, they are calle

(Ernest Bonat) Lookup tables contain, in general, a fixed list of data. This data doesn’t change very often in database business applications. Examples of this data could be a product list, category type, supplier list, state name, zip code, phone area code, etc. In Windows and Internet web business

(Peter Zaitsev) On many web sites you would see a counter how many time given object – blog post, forum thread, image, movie etc was viewed. This is sometimes handy feature but it can be rather expensive from performance point of view.

(Robin Schumacher) We’re rounding the corner on releasing the first MySQL 6.0 beta, which will have a number of updates to our new Falcon transaction storage engine. One enhancement I wanted to give everyone a sneak-peek on is the addition of user-defined tablespaces for Falcon.

(Jag Singh) In the absence of other advanced techniques for star join optimization, nested fact join with dimensions ensuring indexes are used for each dimension join delivers reasonable performance.

(Raj Thukral) So you ran into some basic limitations with MyISAM when your site got busier. Even single row updates would lock the whole table and slow things down to a crawl. Then you updated to InnoDB to get the benefit of row-level locking, but now the site is even slower than before. What gives?

(Ronald) I didn’t know you could actually do this before addressing this problem in a benchmark using 5.0.36.

(Kevin Burton) Today I needed the ability to create a Oracle-style sequence generator outside of the normal MySQL auto-increment functionality.

(Jay Pipes) Today, Lenz was putting together some stats on PlanetMySQL feeds added since January this year, and asked in an email whether he should include totals in the stats. I responded yes, and offered a quick SQL solution to get those numbers out of the database. I thought it might be useful fo