Sean Hull

MySQL tables, including MyISAM and InnoDB, two of the most common types, experience fragmentation as data is inserted and deleted randomly. Fragmentation can leave large holes in your table, blocks which must be read when scanning the table. Optimizing your table can therefore make full table scans and range scans more efficient.   Fragmentation – […]

In our last piece on MySQL deployments in the cloud we hit on areas including disk I/O, backups, security, scalability and network traffic. Now we’ll cover the rest. 1. Manage Security Security is an area of the cloud that gets a lot of press attention. Internet firms that have already hosted their apps in managed […]

Cloud deployments of internet sites are becoming much more prevalent everyday.  Let’s take a look at what type of special considerations we’ll need to make for hosting MySQL successfully in the cloud. 1. Pay attention to disk I/O For all databases, disk I/O is an important consideration.  MySQL of course is no different, and when […]

MySQL has a wonderful facility for capturing slow queries called the slow query log.  However if yours is not enabled when trouble occurs, and restarting the database is not an option, you’ll need another solution.   This is where a tcpdump can come in handy.  It can be used to watch a network interface and display […]

Hotbackups are a staple of many different database platforms, but they remain sadly absent from the core MySQL distribution.  Not to worry, the open-source XtraBackup utility has just arrived to rescue you. All Different Types of Backups Relational Databases typically have a lot in common in terms of backups.  They have different names for things, […]

MySQL has sophisticated character set support, and can store, retrieve and collate single byte, and multi-byte character sets alike. Sean Hull explores using non-default character sets and settings, which use the hierarchy to control these settings. What Are Character Sets Generally? Character sets are ways of storing string or text data in a database. Since […]

Benchmarking can be a very revealing process. It can be used to isolate performance problems, and drill down to specific bottlenecks. More importantly, it can be used to compare different servers in your environment, so you have an expectation of performance from those servers, before you put them to work servicing your application. We deploy […]

The MySQL Binary Log files are important to the proper functioning of the database and facilitate replication, and recovery. This article discusses some of the inner workings of these important files, and explains how ordering of transactions also plays into how they work. Introduction The MySQL binary logs are an important part of your database […]

Increasingly, enterprises are looking at cloud services such as Amazon Web Services for their deployments. Datacenter virtualization is much more sophisticated than its desktop counterpart is, providing a whole suite of tools that allow you to control every aspect of your deployments. Join Sean Hull as he explores the MySQL – Amazon EC2 solution. Introduction […]

Multi-master MySQL provides a database administrator with a host of new features. Sean Hull discusses how multi-master MySQL aids the DBA in areas of database administration that can negatively impact performance of the primary database. Introduction In our last article we introduced multi-master mysql, the replication topology which provides you with two masters, one active […]

Multi-master replication for MySQL is easy to setup, is similar to master-slave replication and provides a host of features and options not available with the regular master-slave setup. Add to that the MMM database management tool, and you have a flexible, highly available MySQL cluster on which to host your application. Introduction Multi-master replication for […]

As MySQL has evolved and added sophisticated and newer features, there are some areas that remain a bit rough around the edges. Maatkit offers a whole slew of tools for doing backup and restore, finding tables, monitoring your database server and many other database administration tasks you may not have even thought of. Introduction As […]