General

Are you monitoring RSS & VSZ?

Monitoring MySQL Memory is a rather critical task because you can’t limit MySQL’s usage of physical memory resources. Improperly configured servers running MySQL can crash because you don’t understand memory usage.

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Testing your system

I have raised this specific topic 3 times this week alone, twice in a MySQL setting. The fundamental philosophy of testing is NOT to verify features of your product that work, it is to BREAK your system.

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Configuration management concepts for database objects

Correctly managing your MySQL database objects such as schemas, tables, indexes, base data etc, is critical to the success of a 24×7 online website. I rarely encounter a robust working solution as part of my consulting so I would like to share my experience in identifying the best practices you should be adopting whether your an existing organization or just an individual with a simple website.

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Planet MySQL at a new URL

Did anybody notice that http://planetmysql.org now redirects to http://planet.mysql.com ? Curious to know the reason why, perhaps an official MySQL person can give us some details. Also it’s a 302 redirect, not a 301 redirect, interesting?

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Eliminating unnecessary internal temporary tables

I can’t stress enough that people look at SQL statements that are being executed against your production MySQL database, and you optimize queries when you can. Often it’s the improvement to the large number of similar queries executed that can optimize resources.

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Announcing “MySQL Essentials” Training

Are you having problems getting up to speed on MySQL? Are you asking yourself “Is there a hands-on training course we can send a developer/system admin to learn MySQL?”. In response, at 42SQL we have put together two new training courses, MySQL Essentials and MySQL Operations.

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The art of looking at the actual SQL statements

It’s a shame that MySQL does not provide better granularity when you want to look at all SQL statements being executed in a MySQL server. I canvas that you can with the general log, but the inherit starting/stopping problems in 5.

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Watching a slave catchup

This neat one line command can be of interest when you are rebuilding a MySQL slave and replication is currently catching up. $ watch --interval=1 --differences 'mysql -uuser -ppassword -e "

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Some Drupal observations

I had the opportunity to review a client’s production Drupal installation recently. This is a new site and traffic is just starting to pick up. Drupal is a popular LAMP stack open source CMS system using the MySQL Database.

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Best Practices in Migrating to MySQL

This week I was the invited speaker to give a 4 hr presentation to the Federal Government Sector in Washington DC on “Best Practices in Migrating to MySQL“. This was a followup to my day long “MySQL for the Oracle DBA Bootcamp” which I presented in Washington DC last year.

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Strict mode can still throw warnings

MySQL by default is vary lax with data validation. Silent conversions is a concept that is not a common practice in other databases. In MySQL, instead of throwing an error, a warning was thrown and many applications simply did not handle warnings.

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Reducing the MySQL 5.1.30 disk footprint

The current size of a MySQL 5.1.30 installation is around 420M. $ du -sh . 426M . A further breakdown. $ du -sh * 213M bin 20K COPYING 9.8M docs 8.

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Javascript Helpers

Combined with my old favorites of Dynamic Drive , DHTML Goodies and Brain Jar , I’ve added the following to my list of Javascript sources. Mochikit JQuery

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Technology changes, humans don’t. – Web 2.0 NY Second keynote

I needed a rest from my opening keynote review NY Tech 1995-2008. Opening Web 2.0 Expo NY Keynote but a few siginificant points from The Death of the Grand Gesture by Deb Schultz.

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