(Mordred) It’s often quite tempting to make sweeping statements about the superiority of one approach to a problem over another. While various approaches often have advantages, in the real world often there are many competing criteria which make a black and white assessment of choices seem rather si

(Eric Bergen) I’ve noticed a few blog posts recently about people saying how great DRBD is as a fail over mechanism for MySQL. My experience with DRBD has been the complete opposite. It offers almost no benefit over binary log replication for typical MySQL setups and prevents a few things that are p

(Morten M. Christensen) This is a tale about Ruby On Rails, custom stored procedures for MySql 5 and how Rails 1.2.3 is not only opinionated against stored procedures but also actually incompatible with creating and sometimes calling (mysql) stored procedures. The tales does not end with a truly hap

(Stéphane Faroult) One of the most hailed extensions brought to SQL in recent years has been these functions that Oracle calls analytic functions, DB2 calls OLAP functions, and SQL Server 2005 calls ranking functions–but which MySQL, so far, still lacks. The good news is that they can be (relativel

(Andrew Aksyonoff) Until recently I thought that currently popular scripting languages, which mostly evolved over last 10 years or something, must allow for easier portability across different platforms compared to ye good olde C/C++.

(Xaprb) I’ve been working on how to efficiently compare and synchronize data between two tables on different MySQL servers. I’ve also been working on a tool, sort of like rsync for database tables, which implements both algorithms. I profiled it to see how well the comparison algorithms work on real

(Peter Zaitsev) One may think changing PHP session handler from file based to database driven is fully transparent. In many cases it is, sometimes however it may cause some unexpected problems as happened to one of our customers.

(Xaprb) MySQL Table Maintainer is a new utility to help you run table maintenance commands (ANALYZE, CHECK, OPTIMIZE, REPAIR) on your MySQL tables. It’s part of the MySQL toolkit.

(Jason Gilmore) From its inception, speed has been a strong point of the MySQL database server. In fact, its developers have long been cautious to add new features at the expense of performance even when faced by withering pressure from detractors. Yet over time MySQL’s features caught up with its b

(Oli Sennhauser) Recently the question came up if it is faster to restore a MySQL cluster when all nodes are up or only ONE node from each node group during restore. The answer from our gurus was: All nodes up during restore! I wanted to find out why.