A new company often means new responsibilities and learning new ways of doing things. For a tech guy, it often means picking up a new framework or maybe if you are a glutton for punishment, a new language. I recently switched OSes, languages, and databases as a DBA/DB Developer. This was quite a massive shift for me. I went from the stable, enterprise database, SQL Server, to the little engine that could, MySQL. Before the switch, I would stew over the fact that SQL Server lacked features in comparison to Oracle or Postgres, but now I realize that there are far better things to worry about (such as non-blocking backups). I just wanted to go over some of the differences I found.

1. MySQL is a collection of binaries that manipulate data files. It is not a monolithic application that persists its data to disk, but instead it allows another process to manipulate its files even while it’s running. It interprets a folder in its data directory …

The MySQL Connect 2012 conference event being held in San Francisco on Sep 29-30 has a long list of quality MySQL speakers including myself. I will be giving 2 presentations on:

CON8322 – Lessons from Managing 500+ MySQL Instances

In this presentation, learn about the issues of managing a large number of instances of MySQL, supporting 50 billion SQL statements per day. Topics covered:
• The need for monitoring and instrumentation
• How to automate installations, upgrades, and deployments
• Issues with MySQL’s Replication feature with 300 slaves per master
• Traffic minimization techniques
• Creating high availability with regions and zones
• Real-time traffic stats (aggregated every five seconds)

CON8320 – …

I want to propose something that’s mere imagination at this point. There’s a lot of promises made by database vendors whether closed or open source that they have created an RDBMS that can scale across nodes, making a data storage service that can expand with user needs as well as deal with hardware failures. We have the traditional players:

• Oracle has RAC
• MySQL has their cluster product
• Postgres has synchronous replication
• SQL Server has replication and fail-over clustering

The sad truth is this: none of these are fully there yet. Most of them trade the ability to transparently scale and fail over for availability. These solutions do not require major application refactoring. Oracle RAC has a shared disk, which means no IO scaling and a single point of failure (SPF). MySQL Cluster has heterogeneous nodes (although you can remove all SPFs), and it does not perform foreign key …

At the recent South East LinuxFest in June 2012 I gave two MySQL presentations.

The first was on Explaining the MySQL Explain. This presentation details the MySQL Query Execution Plan (QEP) of an SQL statement and how to understand and interpret the information from the EXPLAIN command. Also discussed are additional commands and tools that exist to add supplementary information. These are essential skills that will be used daily in production operations. Download Presentation (PDF)

More detailed information about EXPLAIN and associated commands is available …

Even though I have come late to the party of professional development, relatively speaking, I am acutely aware of the conflict that seems to pervade the developer-DBA relationship. This is what I gather about why this is: DBAs used to be paid better that developers, and often this was because they were able to reduce the overall license and hardware costs of large database installations. Both the size and proprietary nature of databases made them incredibly expensive, so paying an individual gobs of money to make sure they ran efficiently and that the data was preserved was worth it.

Several trends have changed the playing field. The first is the arrival of small, commodity server hardware that makes mainframes or large servers unnecessary, and thus the cost is pushed down dramatically for most installations, while salaries for trained database professionals remained the same.

The second is the explosion of databases that do not (in …

“In short, if you try to authenticate to a MySQL server affected by this flaw, there is a chance it will accept your password even if the wrong one was supplied. The following one-liner in bash will provide access to an affected MySQL server as the root user account, without actually knowing the password.”

$ for i in `seq 1 1000`; do mysql -u root --password=bad -h 127.0.0.1 2>/dev/null; done
mysql>

The following are confirmed distributions that are vulnerable:

• Ubuntu Linux 64-bit ( 10.04, 10.10, 11.04, 11.10, 12.04 ) ( via many including @michealc )
• OpenSuSE 12.1 64-bit MySQL 5.5.23-log ( via @michealc )
• Debian Unstable 64-bit 5.5.23-2 ( via @derickr )
• Fedora ( via hexed and confirmed by Red Hat )
• Arch Linux (unspecified version)

Full details can be found at …

Many do not need any further introduction to this Monty tradition at MySQL events. For the New York Effective MySQL Meetup group this was a new experience for many that I had the opportunity to share at our recent meeting. In 12 months the group has grown to over 280 members, and now recent attendees have experienced black vodka first hand.

A special thanks to Monty Program AB and Colin Charles for providing the alcohol.

Following my 2 presentations at SouthEast LinuxFest on Friday and Open DB Camp on Sunday in Charlotte, NC, I will then be speaking at the first Latin America MySQL event in Buenos Aires, Argentina later this month. This will include at least six MySQL Alumni and key presentations from MariaDB and Tokutek.

I will then be attending the OTN Tour 2012 event in Cali, Colombia the following week and also a dedicated 2 day MySQL Training Days following.

Do you want to closely follow what MySQL is doing around the globe? We've created a Lanyrd guide just for that. It's curated by the MySQL Community, Marketing, Presales and Product Management teams and with some other contributions too.
Tomorrow we'll host the MySQL Innovation Day (in streaming too) and MySQL Connect is also quickly approaching. If you'd like showcase your products and services to the MySQL Community you can take advantage of the various sponsorship opportunities.

Stay tuned for the latest and greatest updates from the MySQL team at Oracle and from our vibrant community!
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A recent question on a mailing list was the best practices for UTF-8 and PHP/MySQL. The following are the configurations I used in my multi-language projects.

MySQL UTF-8 Configuration

# my.cnf
[mysqld]
default_character_set = utf8
character_set_client       = utf8
character_set_server       = utf8
[client]
default_character_set = utf8

PHP UTF-8 Configuration

#php.ini
default_charset = "utf-8"

Apache UTF-8 Configuration

#httpd.conf
AddDefaultCharset UTF-8
<VirtualHost>
    AddCharset UTF-8   .htm
</VirtualHost>

HTML file UTF-8 Configuration

 <meta charset="utf-8">

PHP file UTF-8 Configuration

header('Content-type: text/html; charset=UTF-8');

MySQL connection (extra precaution)

SET NAMES utf8;

Shell UTF-8

And last but not least, even editing files in shell can be affected (.e.g UTF-8 data to be …