MySQL, like a lot of other software, has many knobs you can tweak. Most of these knobs may affect behaviour, but more importantly most affect the memory usage of the server, so getting these settings right is very important.

Most of MySQL’s memory is really used just as a cache, in one form or another, information that otherwise is on disk. So ensuring you have as large a cache as possible is important. However, making these memory sizes too large will trigger the server to start swapping and possibly can cause it to crash or cause the kernel to kill the process when it runs out of memory.  So that’s something we want to avoid.

Certain settings affect memory allocation on a per connection/thread basis, being bounded by thread_cache_size and max_connections.  If you configure for the worst behaviour (max_connections) you may end up not actually using all the memory you have available, memory which normally could be …

I am pleased to announce that the MySQL Database 5.6.4 development milestone release ("DMR") is now available for download (select the Development Release tab). MySQL 5.6.4 includes all 5.5 production-ready features and provides an aggreation of all of the new features that have been released in earlier 5.6 DMRs.  5.6.4 adds many bug fixes and more new "early and often" enhancements that are development and system QA complete and ready for Community evaluation and feedback.  You can get the complete rundown of all the new 5.6.4 specific features here.

For those following the progression of the 5.6 DMRs as the trains leave the station, you should bookmark these MySQL …

I am pleased to announce that the MySQL Database 5.6.4 development milestone release ("DMR") is now available for download (select the Development Release tab). MySQL 5.6.4 includes all 5.5 production-ready features and provides an aggreation of all of the new features that have been released in earlier 5.6 DMRs.  5.6.4 adds many bug fixes and more new "early and often" enhancements that are development and system QA complete and ready for Community evaluation and feedback.  You can get the complete rundown of all the new 5.6.4 specific features here.

For those following the progression of the 5.6 DMRs as the trains leave the station, you should bookmark these MySQL …

At OSCON 2011 last week, Oracle delivered more early access (labs) features for MySQL 5.6 replication. These features are focused on better integration, performance and data integrity:

- The Binlog API: empowering the community to seamlessly integrate MySQL with other applications and data stores;

- Binlog Group Commit and Enhanced Multi-Threaded Slaves: continuing to deliver major improvements to replication performance;

- Durable Slave Reads: further enhancing data integrity.

These new features build on the significant replication enhancements announced as part of the MySQL 5.6.2 Development Milestone Release back in April.

We are always listening to our customers and community. And, based on their needs and input, the MySQL engineering team continues to take …

The InnoDB full-text search capability is an exciting feature. The full-text search itself is generally useful to have in an RDBMS. If an application is using all InnoDB tables except for one that is used for full-text searches, now that last table can be switched to InnoDB. If putting the full-text data in a MyISAM table led to scalability problems, duplication, or a less-than-ideal schema design, now those issues can be addressed.

In this post, I’ll take you through some of the basics of setting up and querying an InnoDB FULLTEXT search index. I’ll leave the scalability and performance aspects to Jimmy’s and Vinay’s blog posts, and just use some toy-sized data for demonstration purposes.

Creating a Table with a …

The default storage engine is InnoDB, or is it not?When MySQL 5.5 went GA, the biggest piece of news was that the default storage engine is now InnoDB. Good news, and hope for a better future, as InnoDB is the most reliable storage engine available for MySQL.

Therefore the expectation is that MySQL 5.6 follows in its steps, and we should see less and less of MyISAM in the database.
The privileges tables, however, are still MyISAM. I was not really expecting to see them disappear so quickly, as I have seen how much work it has been for Drizzle to get rid of them, and even them had to keep MyISAM alive for temporary tables.
However, I was surprised to see that the new tables for replication metadata, the ones that replace the files master.info and relay_log.info are MyISAM by default.
The manual says:
In order for …

The feature is documented in WL#344. (There was a manual online as well together with the binaries for MySQL 5.6.0, but they were removed after a few days for a good reason. I am confident that both the manual and some binaries will eventually show up soon).
Since as of today there are no binaries for MySQL 5.6.x, you need to get the code and …

So, we can have a look at this improvement, which I am sure will make DBAs quite happy. The new feature is an instantaneous exchange between a partition and a table with the same structure. Using this feature, you can transfer the contents of one partition to one table, and vice versa. Since the transition is done only in the attribution of the data, there is no copy involved. The data …