The Boston MySQL User Group got Keith Murphy to speak at the June User Group meeting, about backups. Direct play the video at:http://technocation.org/node/559/playDirect download the video (351 MB) at:http://technocation.org/node/559/downloadLinks referred to in the presentation:MyLVMBackup by

Giuseppe Maxia and Sheeri K. Cabral give an introduction to what MySQL is. A PDF of the slides can be downloaded at http://technocation.org/files/doc/2009_04_Tour.pdf (21 Mb). Links referred to in the presentation, or related to the presentation: The MySQL forge can be found at http://forge.mysql.com, which contains the Wiki (http://forge.mysql.com/wiki) as well as the worklog, code snippets and tools for use with MySQL. Planet MySQL is an aggregate of MySQL-related blogs, including Giuseppe's and mine -- http://planet.mysql.com The website for the 2009 MySQL User Conference and Expo is at http://mysqlconf.com. MySQL Camp is a free conference at the same time as the User Conference. The details, including the schedule, are at http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/MySQLCamp2009Sessions. A collection of User Group videos is at http://technocation.org/category/areas/user-group. All the videos, including User Group ones, are  []

Part 2 of "Understanding How MySQL Works by Understanding Metadata", presented by Sheeri K. Cabral (The Pythian Group) and Patrick Galbraith (Lycos Inc.). This was a 3-hour tutorial. Part 2 is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_Uv_4I9gus The PDF of the slides can be found at http://technocation.org/files/doc/2009_04_Understanding.pdf. From the official abstract at http://www.mysqlconf.com/mysql2009/public/schedule/detail/5682: We have spent countless hours researching over 1,000 pieces of metadata. In the process, we have learned a lot about how MySQL works, and realized that it was a pretty good learning method. Examples: Understanding the query_cache% system variables and Qcache% status variables helps us learn about the query cache—what it is, when it is used, how to examine query cache efficiency, how to tune the query cache. This relates to the GLOBAL_VARIABLES and GLOBAL_STATUS system  []

Part 1 of "Understanding How MySQL Works by Understanding Metadata", presented by Sheeri K. Cabral (The Pythian Group) and Patrick Galbraith (Lycos Inc.). This was a 3-hour tutorial. Part 2 is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3IBVsYGdtA The PDF of the slides can be found at http://technocation.org/files/doc/2009_04_Understanding.pdf. From the official abstract at http://www.mysqlconf.com/mysql2009/public/schedule/detail/5682: We have spent countless hours researching over 1,000 pieces of metadata. In the process, we have learned a lot about how MySQL works, and realized that it was a pretty good learning method. Examples: Understanding the query_cache% system variables and Qcache% status variables helps us learn about the query cache—what it is, when it is used, how to examine query cache efficiency, how to tune the query cache. This relates to the GLOBAL_VARIABLES and GLOBAL_STATUS system  []

What's new, in a nutshell: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/mysql-nutshell.html Release notes: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/news-5-1-x.html (In the video, it's the page entitled "Changes in release 5.1.x"). And yes, very early on (at about 2 minutes in) I talk about my take on Monty's controversial post at http://monty-says.blogspot.com/2008/11/oops-we-did-it-again-mysql-51-released.html The slides can be downloaded as a PDF at http://technocation.org/files/doc/2008_12_New51.pdf or in Open Office presentation format at http://technocation.org/files/doc/2008_12_New51.odp

Sheeri Cabral speaks about the changes in MySQL 5.1 and everything you need to know about upgrading. Get the slides at http://technocation.org/files/doc/2008_12_New51.pdf See the accompanying blog post with more information at http://www.pythian.com/news/1414/new-in-mysql-51-sheeris-presentation

A year ago, the outline was being written. A lot of work was crammed into the intervening months, and I am happy and proud to announce that the MySQL Administrator's Bible has been published, and is sitting on the shelf at many major booksellers already. The official publication date is today -- Monday, May 11th, 2009 -- although some stores have had copies for a week, including Amazon.com.The MySQL Administrator's Bible, published by Wiley Press (available on Amazon.com at

(one note, I have updated a previous blog post by adding the video for the LISA presentation I gave entitled "How to Stop Hating MySQL")OpenSQL Camp is in full swing! Baron Schwartz has done an amazing job organizing this free unconference.We are well into the 2nd session of the day, and the quality of the presentations is excellent (though I expected that!) and it is always great to see people.Some pictures....

The unsung heroes of InnoDB are the logfiles. They are what makes InnoDB automatic crash recovery possible.Database administrators of other DBMS may be familiar with the concept of a "redo" log. When data is changed, affected data pages are changed in the innodb_buffer_pool. Then, the change is written to the redo log, which in MySQL is the InnoDB logfile (ib_logfile0 and ib_logfile1). The pages are marked as "dirty", and eventually get flushed and written to disk.If MySQL crashes, t

As I putter around the MySQL "INFORMATION_SCHEMA", I am finding lots of undocumented behavior for fields that should be straightforward. For example, the "VIEWS" table holds information about views, and the "VIEW_DEFINITION" field contains the view definition, right?Well, when I was looking at the "VIEW_DEFINITION" today, I noticed an odd thing. Even though I had permissions to see the view definition (as proven by the "SHOW CREATE VIEW

One of the most frequently needed functionality in the MySQL Proxy is the need to know which server you are on. This is not given, on purpose, by the proxy, because the proxy is supposed to be transparent. It is not supposed to matter which back-end server you are on.However, for testing purposes we often want to know which back-end server we're on. Thus I developed functionality for "SHOW PROXY BACKEND [INDEX ADDRESS OTHER]"."SHOW PROXY BACKEND INDEX" -- gives t

Almost 2 years ago, in How Open Do You Have To Be To Be Open Source? I wrote:Google and Yahoo! are not rich because they have secrets. They are rich because they started with secrets, but I believe they could safely let their secrets out with very little loss of revenue.Matt Asay’s recent post Google’s slow transformation into an open, transparent company made me dig up that post, which by many standards is old in terms of time, but it’s only now that some of this change is actually happening.Matt ponders,It remains to be seen what, if anything, Google will actually open, but I trust its track record on living up to its word more than Microsoft’s, which also went through a flurry of “We’re now really open!” announcements lately that actually netted the industry…not much.In interesting news, at last night’s Boston Sun/MySQL event (more on that  []

According to the manual, FLUSH LOGS is supposed to:Closes and reopens all log files. If binary logging is enabled, the sequence number of the binary log file is incremented by one relative to the previous file. On Unix, this is the same thing as sending a SIGHUP signal to the mysqld server (except on some Mac OS X 10.3 versions where mysqld ignores SIGHUP and SIGQUIT).If the server is writing error output to a

I was asked today about the ANSI_QUOTES SQL mode.According to http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/server-sql-mode.html, ANSI_QUOTES mode changes the functionality of double quotes (") to be like the backtick (`). Normally the functionality of double quotes is more like that of single quotes (').You might use this when you have a table with spaces or other special characters you would like to escape, without hav

I was contacted by the folks at MONyog and asked if I would review MONyog. Since using MONyog is something I have been wanting to do for a while, I jumped at the chance. Of course, "jumped" is relative; Rohit asked me at the MySQL User Conference back in April, and here it is two months later, in June. My apologies to folks for being slow.This review is an overall review of MONyog as well as specifically reviewing the newest features released in the recent beta (Version 2.5 Beta 2). Feature requests are easily delineated with (feature request). This review is quite long, feel free to bookmark it and read it at your leisure. If you have comments please add them, even if it takes a while for you to read this entire article.While the webyog website gives some information about what MONyog can do, it is a bit vague about what MONyog is, although there is a link to a PDF whitepaper on What is MONyog? which does answer  []

I have *never* had this happen to me.Maybe it's because it's MySQL 6.0.4, maybe it's because it's on Windows, or perhaps I am just up working too late.I have seen mojibake before, but usually it is unintelligible. But this? After I post this I am backing away slowly from my computer.Welcome to the MySQL monitor. Commands end with ; or \\g.Your MySQL connection id is 3Server version: 6.0.4-alpha-community MySQL Community

Recently I had an interesting issue crop up. Due to an unfortunate migration incident in which involved master/master replication and not checking to see if replication was caught up, we ended up with an infinite replication loop of a number of SQL statements. "awk" helped immensely in the aftermath cleanup.The basics of the replication infinite loop were

About six months ago, the question of storing images in a database came up. This is one of my favorite topics, and has many database-agnostic parts.Personally, I think "tell me about storing images in a database" is actually a great interview question, because you will be able to see the difference between someone who has just memorized "what's right" versus someone who is really thinking. It also helps you see how someone will communicate -- if they just say "NEVER do it, it's as bad as crossing the streams!" then they are a type of person that gives you a short answer, without much explanation, and without many nuances. (That may be what you are looking for, but usually you want someone who gives reasons for why they strongly feel one way or another).Consider the following cases:

This is a post about "SYSDATE()" and "NOW()" and "CURRENT_TIMESTAMP()" functions in MySQL.Firstly, note is that of these three, only "CURRENT_TIMESTAMP()" is part of the SQL Standard. "NOW()" happens to be an alias for "CURRENT_TIMESTAMP()" in MySQL.Secondly, note that replication does not work well with non-deterministic functions. And "hey, what time is it?" is non-deterministic. Ask it twice, with a second apart between asking, and both times you get different results (with at least second precision).You can start to see the problem here....but there's more....

"There are 10 types of people in the world -- those who understand binary, and those who don't."The term "binary" in MySQL has many different meanings. How many can you come up with? I have 6, but I am willing to believe there are more!0) "Binary distribution" is the name for the package that contains a binary. Another use is "binary installation" but that's pretty much the same usage pattern as "binary distribution", so I won't count "binary installation" as