“After all the industry speculation about MySQL being a “hot 2008 IPO”, this probably takes most of us by surprise — users, community members, customers, partners, and employees. And for all of these stakeholders, it may take some time to digest what this means. Depending on one’s relationship to MySQL, the immediate reaction upon hearing the news may be a mixture of various feelings, including excitement, pride, disbelief and satisfaction, but also anxiety.”

The deal is for approximately $1 billion in total consideration!

From: http://blogs.mysql.com/kaj/sun-acquires-mysql.html/
also more at Sun’s announcement:
http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/pr/2008-01/sunflash.20080116.1.xml

I just stumbled across this interesting mysql tuning script called MySQLTuner. Don’t see this (or any other similar script) as the magical tool that will optimize your mysel server… There is no such thing, because there are so many different applications and each will require its specific database tunings.
Still, mysqltuner can be very useful tool in many cases, like for ex:

• it gives a quick overview on your running mysql configuration and some common sense recommendations.
• i really liked how it computes the total amount of memory needed for the current configuration (assuming all global buffers will be used and the maximum number of threads being connected).
• very simple usage: you just have to download and run it.

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MySQL announced that they plan to release by the end of the month a ‘release candidate’ of MySQL 5.1 a major new upgrade of the world’s most popular open source database server.

During the announcement that was made at the inaugural ‘Japanese MySQL Users Conference’ earlier last week, MySQL mentioned that several GPL-licensed products are scheduled to be available for download by the end of September: Read the rest of this entry »

One of the most important steps in optimizing and tuning mysql is to identify the queries that are causing problems. How can we find out what queries are taking a long time to complete? How can we see what queries are slowing down the mysql server? Mysql has the answer for us and we only need to know where to look for it…
Normally from my experience if we take the most ‘expensive’ 10 queries and we optimize them properly (maybe running them more efficiently, or maybe they are just missing a simple index to perform properly), then we will immediately see the result on the overall mysql performance. Then we can iterate this process and optimize the new top 10 queries. This article shows how to identify those ‘slow’ queries that need special attention and proper optimization. Read the rest of this entry »

If you site relies on MySQL and stores its sensitive data in a MySQL database, you will most definitely want to backup that information so that it can be restored in case of any disaster (manual mistake to delete some data, software errors, hardware errors, server compromise, etc.). In a previous post I have presented that MySQL provides the basic tool (mysqldump) to perform database backups. This is required because backing up a database is a little different than backing up regular files.

With mysqldump anyone can write a small shell script and running it from cron, it will achieve an automatic backup solution. There are many such scripts already available freely and also many commercial solutions also (I assume as I have not tested any really ). The script that I liked the most is AutoMySQLBackup, because it doesn’t have any real requirements (mysqldump of course is needed – in any mysql client package – and gzip or bzip2 to compress the resulting file) and has all the features I was looking for in such a script.

AutoMySQLBackup has all the features I needed: it can backup a single database, multiple databases, or all the databases on the server; each database is saved in a separate file that can be compressed (with gzip or bzip2); it will rotate the backups and not keep them filling your hard drive (as normal in the daily backup you will have only the last 7 days of backups, the weekly if enabled will have one for each week, etc.). It has also some other features (check the project homepage for full details), that I am not using myself (like email logs for example), but other peoples might find interesting. Read the rest of this entry »

I often need to make a quick backup of one mysql database. This happens right before there will be some major changes to the database, or before performing an upgrade on the mysql server software. Now I don’t recommend this to be done regularly, but still, I use this extensively in this kind of situations… If you are looking for an automated solution to backup your databases you might want to check my other post: “Backup your MySQL databases automatically”
MySQL provides us the tool required to do this: mysqldump. As the name implies, this can make a dump of one database or even to all the databases on the server. You can see all the options on its help manual or on the mysql site.

Basically this is used like:

mysqldump [OPTIONS] database [tables]
mysqldump [OPTIONS] --databases [OPTIONS] DB1 [DB2 DB3...]
mysqldump [OPTIONS] --all-databases [OPTIONS]

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