I started to use Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) recently because it seems promising, and my friends from Percona always recommending it to try out, and frankly, at first sight, I like it. There are few things which I am not happy about, but mostly I feel OK – but when it comes to the […]

It was a long time ago so I won’t write about the conference (it was good as always), but at least I share the slides of my talk here.

Most of the PHP I write runs on Bluemix – it’s IBM self-service cloud, and since I work there, they pay for my accounts :) There are a bunch of databases you can use there, mostly open source offerings, and of course with PHP I like to use MySQL. Someone asked me for my connection code since it’s a bit tricky to grab the credentials that you need, so here it is. Bluemix Environment Variables

In Bluemix, you can simply create a MySQL database (look for “compose-for-mysql” in the catalog), create a set of credentials, and then bind it to your app. I should blog a few more of my PHP-on-Bluemix tricks but you can run a selection of PHP versions and it’s also possible to add extensions that you need, I have found it does have what I need once I figure out how to configure it!

Once the database is bound to the application, then your PHP code running on Bluemix will have an environment variable called …

I’ve been a fan of GNU Parallel for a while but until recently have only used it occasionally. That’s a shame, because it’s often the simplest solution for quickly solving embarrassingly parallel problems.

My recent usage of it has centered around database export/import operations where I have a file that contains a list of primary keys and need to fetch the matching rows from some number of tables and do something with the data. The database servers are sufficiently powerful that I can run N copies of my script to get the job done far faster (where N is value like 10 or 20).

A typical usage might look like this:

cat ids.txt | parallel -j24 --max-lines=1000 --pipe "bin/munge-data.pl  --db live >> {#}.out

However, I recently found myself scratching my head because parallel was only running 3 jobs rather than the 24 I had specified. …

Recently Google announced, that the second generation of Cloud SQL left the beta stage and it is available. I decided to take a look, because last time when I checked it, it looked good, but I couldn’t take it seriously because of the nonexistent SLA. I have a few databases running on Amazon RDS, but […]

I just created the Budapest MySQL Meetup group. I hope there will be interest for that, the first event is under organising. Check it if you are near Budapest!

There's a new JSON data type available in MySQL 5.7 that I've been playing with. I wanted to share some examples of when it's useful to have JSON data in your MySQL database and how to work with the new data types (not least so I can refer back to them later!)

MySQL isn't the first database to offer JSON storage; the document databases (such as MongoDB, CouchDB) work on a JSON or JSON-ish basis by design, and other platforms including PostgreSQL, Oracle and SQL Server also have varying degress of JSON support. With such wide adoption as MySQL has, the JSON features are now reaching a new tribe of developers.

Why JSON Is Awesome

Traditional database structures have us design table-shaped ways of storing all our data. As long as all your records (or "rows") are the same shape and have the same sorts of data in approximately the same quantities, this works brilliantly well. There are some common problems that aren't a good …

Earlier this week we had a discussion with fellow DBAs about our mysql prompts, and at the end of the day it showed up, that a lot of us hit the same problem. The problem is, that when you set up your mysql prompt then ‘\h’ will be resolved to ‘localhost’ when you connect locally […]

Earlier this week we had a discussion with fellow DBAs about our mysql prompts, and at the end of the day it showed up, that a lot of us hit the same problem. The problem is, that when you set up your mysql prompt then ‘\h’ will be resolved to ‘localhost’ when you connect locally […]

I was on the quest of searching the Holy Grail of Go programming, and I found something, which I doubt that it is, but close enough – for the first sight.

I have several problems with GO, first, that I write my code on an OSX box, and I’ll run the programs on Linux hosts, so I have to solve the cross compilation; my second problem with Go, that I don’t really like the “There is a GO project folder, and all the GO projects are relying on” approach. It makes using GitHub painful.

The first problem of mine is easily achievable since GO 1.5: we only need a GOOS environment variable and we can compile to different OS-es (see more at Dave Cheney: http://dave.cheney.net/2015/08/22/cross-compilation-with-go-1-5) easily.

The second problem is easily solvable too, just we have to start using the GOPATH variable for every GO project we have.

I don’t really want to use any external dependencies, so I decided to …