MySQL

Why INSERT IGNORE should not be used

Let’s say you’re building a reference table from source data, e.g. a silver medallion table from a primary source. In this example I am using a file of random locations on the globe extracted from OpenStreetMap (OSM) as my primary source.

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Curated MySQL Data Sets for Realistic Testing

Synthetic benchmarks have their place, but I have always preferred working with real data. Not client production data — that stays private — but publicly available datasets that reflect the messy shapes, skewed distributions, and indexing challenges you encounter in the wild.

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COSCUP 2026: Planning your upgrade to MySQL 9.7

I recently had the pleasure of presenting Planning your upgrade to MySQL 9.7 at COSCUP 2026 in Taipei, Taiwan. COSCUP (Conference for Open Source Coders, Users and Promoters) is one of the largest open source conferences in Asia, and the community there is always engaged and technically sharp.

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A first look at MySQL 26.7 Early Access

MySQL has dropped its newest release , categorized as “Early Access” and available at https://labs.mysql.com/ . While this post is not going to go into depth, I wanted to at least validate the management changes you verify between normal MySQL upgrades.

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VillageSQL Extensions with versioning

VillageSQL has just released it’s latest version 0.0.5 , describing this as stable release for installations with full MySQL 8.4.10 compatibility. With my primary work around extensions, specifically vsql-statistics , I took the new versioning features for a test.

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Producing IQR and Outlier statistics with SQL

The interquartile range (IQR) measures the spread of the middle 50% of a distribution — the distance between the first quartile (Q1) and the third quartile (Q3). Combined with Tukey’s 1.

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Producing Mode statistics with SQL

The mode is the value or values that appear most frequently in a dataset. Unlike the mean or median, it applies naturally to categorical and ordinal data — star ratings, product codes, survey responses — and reveals what is most common, not what is average.

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Extending MySQL Capabilies with UDFs, Plugins and Components - Part 2

MySQL offers three different approaches to extending the SQL capabilities with the default product you download and install. These are: User Defined Function (UDF) MySQL Manual MySQL Plugin MySQL Manual MySQL Component MySQL Manual In my prior post I provided a new uuidv function that accepted a numeric argument to return a string of the version of UUID specified.

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Producing Alternative Means statistics with SQL

MySQL’s built-in AVG() computes the arithmetic mean — the sum divided by the count. That is the right default for many questions, but it is not always the right measure of central tendency.

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Extending MySQL Capabilities with UDFs, Plugins and Components

MySQL offers three different approaches to extending the SQL capabilities with the default product you download and install. These are: User Defined Function (UDF) MySQL Manual MySQL Plugin MySQL Manual MySQL Component MySQL Manual For the purposes of this post I will be using the current LTS version MySQL 8.

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Producing One-Sample Z-Test statistics with SQL

The one-sample Z-test determines whether a sample mean differs significantly from a known population mean when the population standard deviation is also known. It is the appropriate test when the population parameters are established — quality control benchmarks, national averages, long-run process measurements — and you want to evaluate whether a new sample is consistent with them.

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Switching to JSON Error Logging in MySQL

You no longer need to manually parse the MySQL Error log via scripting and RegEx pattern matching. Using the component_log_sink_json component you can obtain JSON error logging for easier parsing.

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Installing MySQL 9.7 LTS Community Edition on CentOS

Historically installing MySQL on a RedHat Compatible Linux server was as simple as yum install mysql-server. Today’s MySQL Oracle Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, and Fedora 9.7 instructions are not accurate mixing in 8.

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Using GenAI directly in the database. A practical example using MySQL 8.0

If you have a typical MySQL production setup using MySQL 8.0 (EOL) with replication, you can take advantage of VillageSQL extensions to generate AI responses directly with your source data with no impact on your production setup or existing application software.

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