In our latest article at Database Journal we talk about Character Sets in MySQL.  What are they?  How do they affect searching?  How do they affect data that is inserted or updated?  How can I set and control the for an application or globally in my database?  And what pre-tell is collation?  We answer all these questions and more.

Database Journal – Understanding MySQL Character Sets

Benchmarking is liking running your system through it’s paces.  You don’t know how fast your software and hardware are until you’ve put some pressure on them.  Benchmarking tools allow you to do just that.  We use sysbench to look at the operating system and mysqlslap to run queries in the MySQL database.

Database Journal – MySQL Server Benchmarking 101

MySQL’s binary logs are an important part of a properly functioning database.  They facility point-in-time recovery, and allow replication to operation.  We dig into these files, and look at what’s inside them, and how they work.

An Inside Look at the MySQL Binary Log Files

Multi-master MySQL, with the MMM management software brings a whole host of new features, and manageability to your MySQL deployments.   Run backups, alter tables, perform upgrades all without slowing down your production users.

Read more at Database Journal – Using Multi-master MySQL To Get A Leg Up On Database Performance

This month on Database Journal we talk about multi-master MySQL using circular replication to achieve high availability.

Read more at DatabaseJournal – Intro to Multi-Master MySQL

If you’re new to the MySQL DBA role, you’ll be excited to learn about the Maatkit toolset.  It provides a whole host of valuable functionality and fills many of the DBAs day-to-day needs.

DatabaseJournal – Wonders of Maatkit

In our March DBJ article we talked about some of the storage engines to choose from with MySQL.  With it’s plugin storage engine architecture, you have a range of options.  In our April article we continue to discuss a further selection of storage engines, and what features they offer to the DBA and database architect.

Database Journal – Exotic Storage Engines

In this month’s Database Journal piece we look at the spectrum of MySQL storage engines available, and examine what some of their strengths and weaknesses are.

View the article here: Survey of MySQL Storage Engines

In the last of our three part series on MySQL high availability we discuss the Linux Heartbeat project, and how it can be used to automate failover between two MySQL databases.

Heartbeat exposes a virtual IP address for use by the database, and manages it as well.  In the event that one server becomes unavailable, Heartbeat will  revoke primary control of DRBD from that node, hand over the IP address to the alternate node, mount the DRBD device, and start MySQL.  MySQL’s InnoDB engine will then perform crash recovery, rollback uncommitted transactions, and startup.

Read the full article at Database Journal – DRBD & MySQL, Heartbeat Setup

In part two of our article on DRBD and High Availability, we take you step-by-step through setting up Sun’s Virtualbox software, creating a couple of VMs, and then installing CentOS on those.  These two virtual Linux boxes then serve as two nodes in our DRBD mirrored disk setup which we use as a platform to install MySQL.

DRBD, MySQL and the Virtualbox Setup – Database Journal

Keep on the lookout for our third part in the series next month.  In that issue we’ll explain how the Linux Heartbeat project can be used to control the whole setup, and provide automatic failover in the event that one node goes down.