2010 has been the first year I have re-presented any of my developed MySQL presentations. Historically I have always created new presentations, however Paul Vallee gave me some valuable advice at UC 2010. In the past two weeks I’ve traveled to seven countries in South America on the OTN LA tour where I have been speaking about and promoting MySQL.

My three current presentations have been improved and even simplified, more future improvements are planned. There is definitely a benefit in repeating a good presentation multiple times.

My SQL Idiosyncrasies That Bite OTN View more …

This is one of the MySQL presentations I’m doing on the OTN LAD Tour in South America, starting today in Lima, Peru.

MySQL Best Practices for DBAs and Developers

Learn the right techniques to maximize your investment in MySQL by knowing the best practices for DBAs and Developers. Understand what subtle differences between MySQL and other RDBMS products are essential to understand in order to maximize the benefits and strengths of MySQL. We will be covering areas including the minimum MySQL configuration, ideal SQL, MySQL security and schema optimizations.

• MySQL Configuration default settings including SQL_MODE
• Documenting, formatting and future proofing your SQL
• Developing and reviewing all SQL paths
• MySQL physical and user security
• The best schema optimizations
• Essential Monitoring and …

SQL Antipatterns, by Bill Karwin
I remember that when I finished reading The Lord Of The Rings, I felt a pang of disappointment. "What? Already finished? What am I going to read now? What can give me the same pleasure and sense of accomplishment that these wonderful pages have given me?"
That's how I felt when I came to the last page of SQL Antipatterns. And, no, Bill Karwin doesn't tell imaginary tales from a fictitious world. This book is full of very real and very practical advice, but all the material is presented with such grace and verve that I could not put it down until the very end. I read it cover to cover in just a few hours, and I savored every page.

What is this Antipatterns, anyway? The title may deceive a casual bookshop browser into believing that it's about some philosophical database theory. Digging further, you realize …

Last night I was the invited guest at the SF MySQL Meetup. In my presentation “Successful MySQL Scalability” I talked about a set of principles to ensure appropriate system architecture, data availability and best practices to build an ideal solution for your business. The presentation was also live streamed and is available online.

Successful MySQL Scalability

My closing presentation at the dedicated MySQL track at ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2010 discussed various techniques and best practices for improving the ROI of developer resources using MySQL. Included in the sections on Design, Security, Development, Testing, Implementation, Instrumentation and Support were also a number of horror stories of not what to do, combined with practical examples of improving productivity.

Increasing MySQL Productivity View more presentations from Ronald Bradford.

Updated: 29-Jun-2010, 30-Jun-2010.

For me, ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2010 started on Friday with the ACE Directors briefing. Best practices topic was touched there slightly and I twitted about it. I decided that the feedback deserves a blog post so I’m simply quoting the conversation here. If you have anything to add, you know where to find the comment box.

alexgorbachev:
best practices should be forbidden or rather renamed to blue-prints #ACED …

By default MySQL allows you to create user accounts and privileges with no password. In my earlier MySQL Best Practices: User Security I describe how to address the default installation empty passwords.

For new user accounts, you can improve this default behavior using the SQL_MODE variable, with a value of NO_AUTO_CREATE_USER. As detailed via the 5.1 Reference Manual

NO_AUTO_CREATE_USER

Prevent the GRANT statement from automatically creating new users if it would otherwise do so, unless a nonempty password also is specified.

Having set this variable I attempted to show the error of operation to demonstrate in my upcoming “MySQL Idiosyncrasies that bite” presentation. …

It is critical that you do not use the default MySQL installation security, it’s simply insecure.

Default Installation

When installed, MySQL enables any user with physical permissions to the server to connect to the MySQL via unauthenticated users. MySQL also provides complete access to all super user privileges via the ‘root’ user with no default password.

$ mysql -uroot
mysql> SELECT host,user,password FROM mysql.user;
+--------------+------+-------------------------------------------+
| host         | user | password                                  |
+--------------+------+-------------------------------------------+
| localhost    | root |                                           |
| server.local | root |                                           |
| 127.0.0.1    | root |                                           |
| localhost    |      |                                           |
| server.local |      | …

I was there in the meetup and my feeling was a mix about the same. It was nice to have Kaj here (for the first time) and listen to him about Sun's acquisition. On the other hand it was disheartening to see so few people from corporates turning up. It was almost negligible. I'm still positive on this and do expect many more people to turn up. There were a total of three talks in the meet and then we had some chit chat with people.

In his first talk, Kaj first greeted everybody in Hindi, Tamil and Kannada and many were delighted. Kaj touched various aspects of Sun's acquisition and also their on-boarding struggle. He also mentioned about MySQL considering Sun's liberal SCA in place of their stricter CLA. (I haven't gone through SCA to actually comment on it's benefits)

Second talk by Thava was on how to contribute code to …

Properties:

Description:

If you have slow query logs enabled (with --log-slow-queries), this variable will help interpret all those queries that are not using indexes as slow queries.

Usage:

While …