English

Recently I found in a forum the following request for help:

My MySQL instance crashed because of free disk space fault. I saw in /var/lib/mysql all the files: ibdata1, ib_logfile* and all the folders containing frm files. Well, when i solved the problem and run successfully the instance, some databases disappeared. One of those is the most important, and i don’t know how many tables had and their structures. Is there any way for recover the entire lost database (structure and data) only having the …

A few days ago Codership announced their new version Galera v1.1 - synchronous Replication Cluster for MySQL. Before we look at the new feature of Rolling Online Schema Upgrade (OSU) we have a look at how to upgrade to the new Galera release.

A rolling upgrade of your synchronous Galera Replication Cluster from version 1.0 to 1.1 is quite easy when you stay at the same MySQL version (5.5).

To not lose the availability of your database service during the upgrade you should have at least 3 Galera nodes in …

Introduction

Galera is a synchronous Multi-Master Replication for MySQL. It is therefore in competition with several other MySQL architectures:

• Master-Master Replication with MySQL
• MySQL Cluster
• The non-open source product called Schooner

Very often they can be easily replaced by Galera’s synchronous Multi-Master Replication for MySQL.

All those products have some advantages and disadvantages. Very often MySQL Master-Master Replication is used in the field because of its simplicity to set-up. But …

Introduction

Recently a customer claimed that his queries were slow some times and sometimes they were fast.

First idea: Flipping query execution plan caused by InnoDB could be skipped because it affected mainly MyISAM tables.

Second idea: Caching effects by either the file system cache caching MyISAM data or the MyISAM key buffer caching MyISAM indexes were examined: File system cache was huge and MyISAM key buffer was only used up to 25%.

I was a bit puzzled…

Then we checked the table_open_cache …

Introduction

MySQL/Galera synchronous Multi-Master Replication consists of 2 parts:

• The wsrep patches for MySQL (codership-mysql) and
• the Galera Replication Plugin (galera).

If you do not want to download the prepared binaries you can build it on you own.
First you have to download the native MySQL sources, then patch it with the Galera wsrep patches and compile it. In a second step you have to build the Galera Plugin.

This is especially useful because in the standard Galera binary tar balls the garbd …

Summary: In this article we have a short look at a simple MySQL example program written in Vala.

Recently a customer pointed me to a programming language called Vala. Vala is a C-style programming language generating C code which afterwards can be compiled and linked with the normal gcc.
This I found pretty useful to not mess around with pointers and all this stuff in C and to be capable anyway to write C programs for some projects I had in mind in my head since long.
Vala is mostly used around the Gnome …

Our Advanced MySQL Developer Workshop is over now and IMHO it was quite a success.
During the workshop it is planned to have some exercises. If you are curious and if you want to test or train your MySQL skills, find the exercises here: Advanced MySQL Developer Workshop Exercises.

The solutions are available on request as well.

If you like those exercises we could also provide the exercises of our Advanced MySQL DBA Workshop. Please let us know if you are interested in…

Have fun.

Abstract: In this article we provide a little JMeter WebShop Example Benchmark for MySQL.

For our Advanced MySQL Developer Workshop we have one exercise Benchmarking MySQL with JMeter. For this exercise we are using the FoodMart-2.0
[1
] Schema and simulating a simple WebShop Transaction:

• Logging in
• Put some articles into the basket
• Buy the articles
• Log out

I found it pretty hard to find good and detailed examples how to do this with JMeter and I wasted a lot of time searching and figuring out how it …

Abstract: In this article we have a look at the compression options of common zipping tools and its impact on the size of the compressed files and the compression time. Further we look at the new parallel zip tools which make use of several cores.

Start with a backup first

From time to time I get into the situation where I have to compress some database files. This happens usually when I have to do some recovery work on customers systems. Our rule number 1 before starting with a recovery is: Do a file …

Abstract: In this article we discuss how big is the performance impact of MySQL TRIGGERs compared to application side logging (with INSERT) into a MySQL table.

What was in my mind from the past

A while ago when MySQL released its Stored Language features in v5.0 I have seen a book
[1
] about this topic. In this book was a performance comparison between different implementations of computational tasks, one was done in MySQL Stored Language. The result was, that MySQL Stored Language feature sucks also …

With the new MySQL 5.6 release there are some more InnoDB Data Dictionary Tables in the INFORMATION_SCHEMA:

New with MySQL 5.5 are:

New with MySQL 5.6 are:

Abstract: Heating up the InnoDB Buffer Pool during the MySQL instance startup should significantly improve InnoDB Performance in the beginning of the life of the Instance. This is achieved by sequential scans of the needed data instead of random I/O reads which would happen when we just let the system work it out by itself.
How to find the database objects which can be loaded during MySQL start-up and how to load them automatically is described in this article.

New Table in the INFORMATION_SCHEMA

Some of my …

Abstract:

It is common practice in MySQL table design that fields are declared as NOT NULL but some non-sense DEFAULT values are specified for unknown field contents. In this article we show why this behavior is non optimal an why you should better declare a field to allow NULL values and use NULL values instead of some dummy values.

What we can see often out in the field

Recently we had a discussion with a customer if it makes more sense to store a default value or NULL in InnoDB tables when we do not know …

One of our partners recently asked me on what platforms do we usually see MySQL installed out there…

The last 5 years I gave the answer: Typically it is 80% Linux, 10% Windows, 5% Solaris and 5% all others. But this was only the picture of my limited view and I was not sure how objective this was.

This time I really wanted to know it and so I collected the information of about 570 MySQL installations of customers.

The following numbers came out:

Operating System

We did recently a review of one of our customers systems and we found that the Query Cache was disabled even thought it had significant more read than write queries.
When we asked the customer why he has not enabled the Query Cache he mentioned a review that was done a few years ago and which stated that the Query Cache hit ratio was non optimal.
This was verified on a testing system which had the Query Cache enabled by accident.

But we all thought that the Query Cache would make sense in this situation so …

Dear MySQL and MariaDB User,

With this Newsletter you receive the News about FromDual for Summer 2011.

Sie können diesen Newsletter auch auf deutsch lesen oder sich den deutschprachigen Newsletter. abonnieren.

Topics

• Basic- and Silver Support for MySQL and MariaDB
• FromDual Performance Monitor for MySQL with more InnoDB Graphs
• Summer vacation without a MySQL DBA?
• Upcomming Trainings and Workshops
• Technical Information
• German Speaking MySQL User Group founded
• News about MySQL

Basic- and Silver-Support for …

When we analyze our customers systems we see typically a high fragmentation of the query cache after a while. This leads to a less optimal use of the Query Cache than possible.

With the following Query you can see the values for your Query Cache:

mysql> SHOW GLOBAL STATUS LIKE 'Qcache%';
+-------------------------+----------+
| Variable_name           | Value    |
+-------------------------+----------+
| Qcache_free_blocks      | 11328    |
| Qcache_free_memory      | 89442000 |
| Qcache_hits …

A customer rose a support case with a problem on his Master-Master set-up. The 2^nd Master claims to have a problem:

master2> SHOW SLAVE STATUS<br>G
                ...
    Master_Log_File: master1-bin.000014
Read_Master_Log_Pos: 97975045
   Slave_IO_Running: No
  Slave_SQL_Running: Yes
Exec_Master_Log_Pos: 97975045
      Last_IO_Errno: 1236
      Last_IO_Error: Got fatal error 1236 from master when reading data from
                     binary log: 'Client requested master to start replication …

From August 15^th to 17^th FromDual will have an Advanced MySQL Developer Workshop with Citrus in Helsinki (Finland). The workshop will be held in English. The workshop topics you can find here and the registration form is available here.

Today the German speaking MySQL User Group (DMySQLAG) was officially founded in Berlin. The association advocates:

• the information of the use, the handling and the experience with MySQL and development in the MySQL Eco-System as well as systems which use MySQL.
• the exchange of experience between MySQL users about MySQL and other systems.
• the Advice and Cooperation with Oracle and vendors of other systems.
• the submission of suggestions of the members to Oracle and vendors of other systems.

The intention of …

In our last customer project we had around 600 Gbyte of data in a MySQL database. Because this database consumed a significant amount of our disk space and backups with the InnoDB backup tool took pretty long we wanted to find out if we could get rid of some of the tables.

This application was growing over the last 10 years and it was not clear if some tables are still in use or not.

But how to find out when a table was touched last? MySQL/InnoDB theoretically could know about but does not report this …

A customer who is handling digital certificates had a problem with one of those. So we had to investigate.

Because the certificate is in binary form it is stored in a BLOB and we had to extract it from the database to do some verifications.

What first came to my mind was to extract the certificate with the SELECT INTO OUTFILE command. But the verification tool complained and told us that the certificate has a wrong format.

Luckily I found in the documentation the following statement: If you use INTO …

In the following article I have summarized some steps and hints to set-up a MySQL active/passive failover Cluster also sometimes called MySQL HA.

With such a set-up you can achieve a 99.99% (4x9) HA set-up for MySQL (52 minutes downtime per year). The same procedure also works for PostgreSQL, Oracle and other database systems running on Linux (DRBD runs on Linux only).

The concept

The concept of an active/passive failover Cluster is the following:

• You have 2 servers (also called nodes).
• They communicate …

Be careful when using SAN (Storage Area Networks) or similar shared storage solutions (and any other virtualization, consolidation or cloud solutions).

This week it happened again: A customer called us because he had some troubles with his on-line shop (note the date!). Everybody in his company complained that the databases are answering slowly.

When looking on the box (with iostat) we have seen some I/O load and some pending reads in InnoDB (SHOW ENGINE INNODB STATUS and SHOW GLOBAL STATUS LIKE …

From the Cooperation of these two companies arises the biggest independent service provider for MySQL and MariaDB in Europe.

Hamburg, Uster – February 28, 2011 - The Hamburg based PrimeBase Technologies and the near Zürich located FromDual are forming a Cooperation for MySQL products and services, starting March 1st, 2011.

This Cooperation enables both companies to offer a complete set of services for all MySQL and MariaDB customers.

The customers of both parties now have he possibility to demand a …

A few days ago I had to deal with MySQL Cluster replication. I did not do this for a while so I was prepared to expect some interesting surprises once again.

For those who MySQL Cluster - Cluster circular replication is the daily business they may skip this article. For all the others they possibly can profit from our learnings.

I am talking about the following MySQL Cluster set-up:

More detailed information about such set-ups you can find in the MySQL Cluster documentation.

Situations that lead to a …

In the old days everything was simpler. We had one maker of our favourite database management system and possibly the choice between different Storage Engines. Mostly the decision has to be taken between MyISAM and InnoDB. When you care about your data integrity you have chosen InnoDB.

Nowadays it is more complex. We have several different makers of our favourite database management system: Oracle/MySQL, Monty Program AB and Percona with their products: MySQL, MariaDB and Percona Server.

We have different …

It is generally well known that indexes help a lot to speed up database queries (especially SELECT but also UPDATE and DELETE). It is less known, that indexes also have some disadvantages.

One of these disadvantages is, that indexes require space in memory and on disk. An other disadvantage of indexes is, that they slow down DML statements like INSERT and DELETE.

We often see at our customers that they do not realized this behavior. Now I found the time to show the impact of (too) many indexes graphically. …

A while ago I did some research about MySQL audit functionality and logon a and logoff triggers. MySQL and MariaDB provide a logon trigger in the form of the init_connect variable but no logoff trigger where most of the work for auditing would be done. When we would have a logoff trigger we could track the login and possibility some activity of a user and implement auditing functionality.

Yesterday when I was looking into the code for an answer to the question of one of my customers this research came into …

Introduction

In his presentation about PBXT at the DOAG Conference 2010 Paul McCullagh was speaking about memory resident PBXT tables. They will be available in version 1.1 of the PBXT Storage Engine Plugin. Memory resident PBXT tables should have similar characteristics like normal MySQL MEMORY</span> tables</a>. But in addition to the MEMORY tables they are transactional and can handle BLOB</span> and TEXT attributes.

An alternative to this feature would be the MySQL dynamic heap row …

When you are working with MyISAM [ 1 ] tables MySQL provides a feature called the Midpoint Insertion Strategy [ 2 ]. You can enable it with the parameter key_cache_division_limit [ 3 ].

By default, the key cache management system uses a simple LRU [ 4 ] strategy for choosing key cache blocks to be purged:

When using the Midpoint Insertion Strategy feature, the LRU chain is divided into two parts:

• the hot sub list

and

• the warm sub list.

The division point between those two parts is not fixed, but the …

With one of its partners FromDual plans to offer an Advanced MySQL DBA Workshop. The first workshop should run in November 2010.

To offer the best possible contents to the participants we want your feedback about the proposed topics, about the missing topics and what you think in general about such a workshop.

Please let us know your opinion. Either as comment on our web-site or for our eyes only at Feedback.

Thank you for your participation.

MySQL Cluster is mainly an in-memory database. Nevertheless it requires a good I/O system for writing various different information to disk.

The information MySQL Cluster writes to disk are the:

• Global Checkpoints (GCP) which are the transactions.
• Local Checkpoints (LCP) which is a dirty image of the data.
• Backup.

In the following schema (a 2-node Cluster) you can see what is related to each other:

Please find here the meaning of each parameter:

Henrik Ingo from the Open Database Alliance (ODBA) did an interview with Oli Sennhauser of FromDual about the European MySQL database landscape and its future. If you want to know more about our opinion in this matter please read here.

For more technical insight see also our former presentation: MySQL, where are you going?.

Our presentation MySQL, where are you going? of March 25 at the OpenExpo in Bern is now available in German and English.

When you have missed it, you can download it now from here…

The video recording should be available as well soon.

Problem

A customer recently showed up with the following problem:

*With your guidelines
[ 1
] I am now able to send the MySQL error log to the syslog and in particular to an external log server.
But I cannot see which user connects to the database in the error log.

How can I achieve this?*

Idea

During night when I slept my brain worked independently on this problem and in the morning he had prepared a possible solution for it.

What came out is the following:

• We create an UDF which allows an application to …

Today a customer with corrupted data files showed up. When we enquired a bit more he told us that he had a broken I/O controller. This is one of the worst things which can happen to you!

The reason is the following: When a I/O controller starts to die it often does not happen immediately. The controller dies slowly producing more and more corrupt data. When you just write data without checking or reading them it can take days or even weeks until you discover the problem.

But the nasty thing is, that even …

Recently we had a case where a customer got some corrupted blocks in his InnoDB tables. His largest tables where quite big, about 30 to 100 Gbyte. Why he got this corrupted blocks we did not find out yet (disk broken?).

When you have corrupted blocks in InnoDB, it is mandatory to get rid of them again. Otherwise your database can crash suddenly.

If you are lucky only “normal” tables are concerned. So you can dump, drop, recreate and load them again as described in the InnoDB recovery procedure …

According to different sources from the web the decision about the Oracle - Sun merger has been approved by the European commission soon. So at least in the West it is clear what is going on. Let us see what the East decides…
[ 1
],
[ 2
].

Oracles arch-enemy Microsoft has already brought its weapons in position against the target with its: Microsoft offers Oracle-phobes MySQL migration tool"
[ 3
],
[ 4
]. So far so good. Nothing new, nothing special.

What made me a bit edgy was the following …

There are 2 different possible situations you can face when you have to deal with MySQL and syslog:

• MySQL is used as back-end for syslog to store the logging information.
  [ 6
  ]
• MySQL itself should report to the syslog.

In this blog article we look at the second situation: How can you make MySQL reporting to the syslog.

Since the version 5.1.20 MySQL is capable to log to the syslog
[ 1
],
[ 2
]. This is done by the MySQL angel process mysqld_safe.

You can enable the syslog when you add the syslog parameter …

iostat is a very handy tool to help you investigating what kind of performance problems you have. Especially your databases can cause a lot of troubles to your I/O system and thus it would be very nice if every DBA has installed iostat on all of his MySQL database servers.

Unfortunately most of the Linux distributions do NOT install iostat by default. This causes often unfortunate situations when you are in a MySQL consulting engagement or have a MySQL support case and ask the customer for the output of …

I really like this new toy (for me) called UDF. So I try to provide some more, hopefully useful, functionality.

The newest extension I like is the possibility to write to the MySQL error log through the application. Oracle can do that since long. Now we can do this as well…

A list of what I have done up to now you can find here:

• Query and change InnoDB spin_wait_delay: udf_spin_wait_delay-5.1.30-linux-i686-glibc23.so (md5 807c6bc09b5dc88a8005788519f2483a, BIN … kbyte)
• Send message to the …

In one of my previous posts I was writing about how to read other processes memory
[ 1
]. As an example I tried to get the value of the hard coded MySQL internal InnoDB variable spin_wait_delay (srv_spin_wait_delay).

In this example we were using gdb or the operating system ptrace function to retrieve this value. This method has the disadvantage that it is pretty invasive.

When I was working on a customer support case I had the idea to solve this by the much less invasive method of User-Defined Functions …

Recently a colleague at Sun was asking me if MySQL can tell him to determine if we are currently in summer time or winter time. He was doing some data analysis of his house where he has installed solar panels.

I am not aware of what he wants to do exactly, but possibly he wants all the data in solar time. So UTC could help him because UTC does not change much over time.

Next thing which came to my mind is, that possibly the good place to do such mathematical calculations is the application code and not the …

As you probably have experienced yet MySQL does not always provide all internal information as you might want to have them and as you are used to have from other RDBMS.

MySQL plans to improve this implementing the/a performance schema and its probably already partly done in MySQL 5.4. But who knows when this will be finished and what it contains at all…

What is not provided to me I want to gather myself… But how? Other RDBMS provide interfaces to attach applications directly to their memory to …

The following summary shows my personal understanding of MySQL 5.1 licenses, packages and products. It does not necessarily reflect 100% the way MySQL understands it. But after all the discussions I hope it is as close as possible to the reality:

MySQL Embedded Database Server

(Download → OEM Software)

Classic  (OEM license, -MEM -InnoDB)
Pro      (= Classic +InnoDB)
Advanced (= Pro +Partitioning)

MySQL Community Sever

(Download → Download)

Community (GPL, -NDB)

MySQL Enterprise Server

(Download → …

This week we had a very interesting problem at a customer: They complained, that their MySQL Cluster takes about 1 hour for a --initial start-up. After some tuning on the hardware and the config.ini they brought it down to around 40 minutes. But this is still unacceptable long…

This sounds a little strange to me. But let us have a look at their config.ini first. It looked more or less like the following (which is already tuned!):

#
# config.ini
#

[NDB_MGMD DEFAULT]
DataDir                      = …

When I set-up a MySQL HA environment for customers I usually do some final failover tests after configuring the whole beast.

To check if the application behaves like expected I always run my little test application (test.sh) from the server(s) where the customers application runs. It displays “graphically” how the application behaves and you can show to the customer immediately what is going on…

Make sure, that you point it to the virtual IP (VIP) or the load balancer (LB).

It was really …

Das dreieckige Rad hat gegenüber dem viereckigen einen gewaltigen Vorteil: Ein Rumms weniger pro Umdrehung!

Translation:

The triangular wheel has one enormous advantage over the quadrangular: One knock less per revolution!

Maybe not new, but I have not heard it yet and I love it. It was about reinventing functionality in a well known product…

Recently we were migrating an InnoDB/MyISAM schema to NDB. I was too lazy to calculate all the needed MySQL Cluster parameters (for example with ndb_size.pl) and just took my default config.ini template.

Because I am really lazy I have a little script doing this for me (alter_engine.pl).

But suddenly my euphoria was stopped abruptly by the following error:

MySQL error code 136: No more room in index file

The usual command that helps me in such a situation is a follows:

# perror 136
MySQL error code 136: No …

A customer has recently experienced a possible memory leak in its NDB-API application. What he did was something like:

# ps aux | grep <pid>

over time and then he saw the RSS increasing. When he would have had a look a little longer he would have seen that the RSS consumption would increase up to a certain level and then becomes stable. Which is the expected behavior.

But how to explain to the customer that his application, which was in fact not doing anything, consumes more RSS?

With a diff over …

Electing a slave as new master and aligning the other slaves to the new master

In a simple MySQL Replication set-up you have high-availability (HA) on the read side (r). But for the master which covers all the writes (w) and the time critical read (rt) there is no HA implemented. For some situations this can be OK. For example if you have rarely writes or if you can wait until a new Master is set up.

But in other cases you need a fast failover to a new master.

In the following article it is shown how to …

The following maintenance jobs are typically run against a MySQL database:

• Backup
• Clean-up binary logs
• Optimize tables
• Purge query cache
• Rotate binary logs

Backup

A backup is not a typical maintenance job. But it behaves more or less like one. The backup should be done regularly depending on the restore/PITR (Point in Time Recovery) requirements.

Make sure, that in the backup all the necessary files (data files, transaction log files, configuration files and binary log files) are included. To prove that …

According to Johans wishes I write down my concerns about MySQL (Cluster) replication. These items are things I run again and again into it with customers:

• SQL-nodes are still loosing too easy connection to cluster after data node or management node restart (which leads into gaps, see next point). Automatic failover or reconnection is just a dream (maybe it works in about 90% of the cases at least).
• Gaps: Whenever I do a cluster reconfiguration (should not be necessary too often, see loosing connection …

The parameter DiskSyncSize is a MySQL Cluster parameter and was added in MySQL 5.1.23.

After the amount of stored bytes of data per file, the data node will fsync (flush) the LCP file to disk, even if a fsync is not needed for consistency.

This is done because the OS will otherwise buffer all the writes, and when a fsync is really needed, it can take a lot of time…

Originally this parameter was hard coded. Now it defaults to 4 Mbyte.

The parameter DiskSyncSize is related to the parameters …

Sometimes it is nice to show customers the functionality of MySQL-Enterprise Monitor (aka Merlin). I install the agents on the servers and the dashboard runs on my laptop. But very often only ssh is open to these servers.

So how to dig a whole through the firewall for MySQL-Enterprise Monitor?

# ssh -R 18080:localhost:18080 oli@where_the_agent_sits

Maybe trivial for you but for me its hard to remember…

What is a sparse file?

“A sparse file is a file where space has been allocated but not actually filled with data. These space is not written to the file system. Instead, brief information about these empty regions is stored, which takes up much less disk space. These regions are only written to disk at their actual size when data is written to them. The file system transparently converts reads from empty sections into blocks filled with zero bytes at runtime.”
[ 1
]

In other words: Files are not …

With MySQL 5.0 the database provides trigger functionality on INSERT, REPLACE, UPDATE and DELETE.

Those of you who know some other RDBMS know, that there are also some system events where one would like to have triggers.

Unfortunately MySQL does not (yet) provide such functionality. This is sad because as database administrator this would be sometimes very helpful.

But you can build your own LOGON and STARTUP trigger.

MySQL provides some hooks for these events…

Complete Story (PDF 160 kbyte).

Recently the question came up if it is faster to restore a MySQL cluster when all nodes are up or only ONE node from each node group during restore.

The answer from our gurus was: All nodes up during restore! I wanted to find out why. So I set up the following cluster and started to measure:

MySQL Cluster set up

MySQL Cluster backup

The backup is not that interesting. But I made the drawing for possible future use :-) :

MySQL Cluster restore

For the restore there are 4 different ways thinkable:

• Restore …

It is possible to use an active - active shared-disk cluster in MySQL in some cases. For doing this you have to fulfill the following requirements:

• Works with MyISAM tables only.
• POSIX-locking compliant cluster file system on the device (such as OCFS2 or GFS).
• External locking must be enabled.
• The MySQL query cache must be turned off.
• The MySQL delay key write must be turned off.
• OS where file locking is supported in MySQL.

Interested? To read more, follow the link: MySQL active - active Cluster (PDF 157 …

Transaction performance relates among other things from I/O performance. This means hard disk performance.

Hard disk performance

When you select a hard disk, an important feature to consider is the performance (speed) of the drive. Hard disks come in a wide range of performance capabilities. As is true of many things, one of the best indicators of a drive’s relative performance is its price. An old saying from the automobile-racing industry is appropriate here: “Speed costs money. How fast do you want …

In a round-robin database (RRD) usually time-series data like network bandwidth, temperatures, CPU load etc. is stored. The data is stored in the way that system storage footprint remains constant over time. This avoids resource expensive purge jobs and reduces complexity.

MySQL does NOT yet provide this kind of storage engine. Although some people were thinking about and some prototypes exists.

Nevertheless in this paper it is shown how you can build your own RRD tables: Round-Robin Database Storage …

The price for a 160 Gbyte disk will be around USD 15'000. This is still a bit expensive. But the access time is around 0.5 ms (both for reading and writing) which is around 10 times faster than a normal 15'000 rpm SCSI disk! The disk has NO cache because it is a cache itself (according to the supplier. Maybe this will change in the future). And the lifetime of a cell is > 5 mio writes. For the same performance one needs usually an array of around 10 disks. If your database is heavily write-I/O bound you …

Probably the answer to this question is already known. But we want to prove it and by the way learn to deal with MySQL and oprofile.

A Federated Table is a table which points to a table in an other MySQL database instance (mostly on an other server). It can be seen as a view to this remote database table. Other RDBMS have similar concepts for example database links.

Read more about the pittfalls with MySQL Federated Tables…

We have added some more database benchmarks to our collection.

More details you can find on our Benchmarking page.

One of the big advantages of MySQL is its concept of pluggable Storage Engines (SE). This means you can choose the most optimal storage engine for your needs. This also has a disadvantage: You have to know what you are doing…

More details you can find here: MySQL pluggable Storage Engines (SE).

MySQL has also a Full-Text Search Engine built in. But this Search Engine is not as fast a you probably want to. Thus there are some alternative Full-Text Search Engines which might be working together with MySQL.

• MySQL/MyISAM Full-Text Search
• Sphinx Search
• Lucene
• MnogoSearch
• Solr (based on Lucene)
• Omikron Fact-Finder
• Ioda
• Kneobase (based on Lucene)
• Egothor
• Xapian

More information

• Wikimedia: Fulltext search engines
• Searching for Text Information in Databases

Who uses what Full-Text Search Engine …

Applications occasionally require redesign. However, redesigning an application cannot be done in one step because the application is distributed or several versions of applications must be supported. MySQL 5.0 provides the necessary means to stealthy migrate your data. In a short overview let’s look at what we plan to do: Stealthy Migration (PDF 98.7 kByte).