This is the third blog post in a series designed to assist companies who wish to migrate their code from Oracle to MySQL. You can read the previous post here.

I went over some of the difficult topics you’ll face when migrating from Oracle to MySQL. However, I left out the topic of database scalability (after all – this is a ScaleBase blog).

Oracle users are used to having a very clear scalability path. You start with an Oracle Standard edition, and if your budget allows, you increase hardware (memory, CPU), improve your storage speed, buy Oracle Enterprise edition and use portioning. If all that fails, you move to a distributed RAC environment. If you’re really on the high end, you buy ExaData2. This is where your journey ends. There is nothing “better”.

That’s great for enterprise …

This is the second blog post in a series designed to assist companies who wish to migrate their code from Oracle to MySQL.

In the first post of the series I tried to explain why you would like your web platform to run on a MySQL database, and not on an Oracle database. In this post, I’ll try to focus on the changes that you need to plan for when migrating from an Oracle environment.

Code

Probably the most obvious change is in code. There is no way around it – you’ll have to change your code.

1. SQL statements.
   While ANSI SQL 92 is a standard, Oracle offers extensions to the spec – and those are used by most developers, sometimes without their being aware of it.
   Of course, when moving to MySQL, those SQL statements will need to change. Some will require only minor …

This is the first blog post in a series designed to assist companies who wish to migrate their code from Oracle to MySQL.

During the World War II “Battle of the Bulge”, General McAuliffe said to the German forces who asked for his surrender: “Nuts!” The rest is history – he won the battle, and the allied forces won the war.

Some things are like that. So absurd that “Nuts” is the only possible reaction. And frankly – running your web infrastructure on an Oracle database is one of those things.

Now, the pricing issue is very well covered. Just see here. And for most people, this should be enough. We had a customer migrating from a 7M USD environment to a 200K yearly environment (licensing and support) – definitely worth the migration hassle!

But it’s not …

Jet Profiler for MySQL 2.0 is now available!Multi-language SupportWe are pleased to announce that multi-language support is now available via this release, responding to feedback and user requests. Support is now available in three languages including English, German and Swedish. If you would like Jet Profiler translated into your language, please let us know. And if you feel you can help us with translation, even better!Adjustable data retention timeframeAdjustable data retention timeframe is another exciting feature. The feature itself allows you to specify how long the application will keep the data before discarding it. This feature enables extended profiling over days or weeks without sacrificing a great deal in performance or disk space. You can access this setting via the recording settings dialog.Top IP statisticsAnother powerful feature in this release is Top IPs. This new feature …

ScaleBase is happy to sponsor the Percona Live London MySQL Conference. If you plan to attend, you can catch our booth on the expo floor or attend Liran’s session – “The Benefits of Database Sharding” at 2PM, October 25th at the Bishopsgate Suite.

In the previous post of this series (which can be found here) I discussed how to identify tables that can serve as good candidates for sharding.

Once you have decided which tables should be sharded (all the rest should be global tables), the choice of sharding keys is rather straightforward, as most will use the table primary key as the shard key. Of course, if multiple tables are sharded, and there is a foreign key relationship between these tables, then the foreign key will serve as the shard key for some tables.

Many people attempt to shard based on customer_id or a resource id, but I have seen how this usually fails in production environments. It is very hard to know in advance which customers belong together in the same database, and since customers can suddenly increase their traffic, this might create an unbalanced situation in which some …

Yeah, we know it’s 6 month from now – but we’ll give a lecture titled “Database Sharding on MySQL” at the Boston MySQL Meetup. Register here.

You might remember that MySQL was aquired by Sun, which later went into Oracle (who won’t? ). As usual in such a process network infrastructure is being merged to ease managing it. Such a merge is currently in process with the effect that previously publicly available servers are now behind Oracle’s firewalls. From a security point of view this is good news, not so for services that relied on this access. One of them is our copy of all old GUI tools repositories on Launchpad. These repositories have been made available 3 years ago when we prepared the switch to MySQL Workbench as our main product. The idea behind it was that anybody who is interested can work on the code and propose patches.

As you can see there this hasn’t worked out well. No merges were proposed during all the time, so we are going to use this interruption of the Launchpad mirroring to stop this …

It has been quite a while since the last release, but we’ve been quite busy. One of the reasons was that we were required to make a relatively major core change in the Workbench codebase, which unfortunately did not add anything new from a user’s point of view. There’s potential for new bugs having been introduced by that, and while the program has been undergoing testing for a while, it’s possible there are more bugs in the hiding.

Because of that, we are releasing test binaries for trial by the community. If no regressions are found, this will be the the next version to be released and the foundation for what will be the next major release, which will contain exciting changes that we know many people have been expecting since some time.

Additionally, 44 bugs have been fixed so far in this release.

If you find a bug, please …