One may wonder what is sshfs and why would you want it?  Well simply put, sshfs allows you to mount another server’s filesystem into a folder on your local system which in the background is doing ssh commands and transfers.  As a mounted folder, you are able to move about and copy files back and forth as everything was on local server.  As you can see this makes it very easy for you to work with files on multiple servers.

Note:  you only have to do the following installations on the server where you are doing the mounts on.

Let us download and install the filesystem framework which is a requirement for sshfs called fuse.

wget http://voxel.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/fuse/fuse-2.7.4.tar.gz
tar zxpfv fuse-*.gz
cd fuse*
./configure

If you get the following error, you will either have to point to the location of the kernel source or …

As you may know mysql fulltext search is not highly scalable.  One of the options to get around this scalability limitation, which I prefer, is to use Sphinx.  You can use Sphinx with out having to alter your mysql installation.  But, if you would like to use from within mysql and not have to worry about how to pass data between Sphinx and MySQL, you can enable sphinxse (sphinx storage engine).  It is not included with mysql by default so you will have to compile it yourself.

Here are the instructions on how to get sphinxse compiled with your mysql installation on CentOS x64.  I am sure same instructions will work for other flavors but I have not tested it.  I will be compiling the most current version of sphinx (0.9.8) with most current stable version of mysql (5.0.51b) at the time of the writing.  Let’s get the appropriate …

Creating table symlinks in MySQL is very easy and it is probably one of the features a lot of MySQL users overlook or never think about. You may ask, why would I want to use symlinks? Some of the reasons you would want symlinks is if you are running low on disk space on the partition where your data generally is and/or you want to move one (or more) table(s) on to a different disk/partition for performance reasons.

One of the things worth mentioning is that MySQL documentation states: “Symlinks are fully supported only for MyISAM tables. For files used by tables for other storage engines, you may get strange problems if you try to use symbolic links.” Keeping that in mind, if you have a innodb table and would like to create symlinks for, you should change the engine type to myisam before symlinking. Although, I have heard and personally used symlinks for innodb databases with no side affects.

First let us find out if your MySQL …

Here is a sample table you can create to test following problem/solution on: CREATE TABLE `t1` ( `a` char(1) default NULL, `b` smallint(6) default NULL ); insert into t1 values ('y','1'); I have a table t1 which has column a and b, I want column a to be updated to ‘n’ when column b = 0. Here is the first version [...]

Setting up master-master replication in MySQL is very similar to how we set up master/slave replication. You can read up about how to setup master/slave replication in my previous post: How to set up master/slave replication in MySQL. There is obviously pros and cons about using master/master replication. But this is not [...] …

Before we go into how to set up master-slave replication in MySQL, let us talk about some of the reasons I have set up master-slave replication using MySQL. 1) Offload some of the queries from one server to another and spread the load: One of the biggest advantages to have master-slave set [...] …

Memcached is a very popular open source object caching server. It was developed to speed up livejournal.com by Danga Interactive.  We use memcached for a lot of our sites.  We use it for different purposes but one main purpose is to cache query results so we don’t have to keep hitting database.  As most [...] …

phpsh requires readline support built into python. It also requires python version 2.4+. You can check which version of python you have installed by typing: python -V Let us download and install readline: wget ftp://ftp.cwru.edu/pub/bash/readline-5.2.tar.gz tar zxf readline-5.2.tar.gz cd readline-5.2 ./configure make install Now let us install python with readline support:

wget http://www.python.org/ftp/python/2.5.1/Python-2.5.1.tgz tar zxf Python-2.5.1.tgz cd Python-2.5.1

I had some problems on one of the [...] …

After I wrote the post: How do I dump all tables in a database into separate files? I got emails from couple people asking how to import the individual table files back in to MySQL. First way to import each sql file created by the post is to import each file individually by [...] …

There have been numerous occasions where I needed to make backups of individual tables from selected database. Usually I can achieve this by typing: mysqldump database_name table1 > table1.sql mysqldump database_name table2 > table2.sql

This could be very painful if you have 10?s or 100?s of tables. Until today, I never ran into a situation where I [...] …