By fernando | March 10, 2011

Piping data to multiple processes

Here’s a simple shell script to stream data to multiple processes. It has many applications, but the reason I wrote it is to stream the same data to multiple netcat processes on remote machines. Here’s the code: #!/bin/bash usage() { cat <&2 usage : multi-fifo target0 [target1 [target2 [...]]] Where each targetN is a program [...]

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By fernando | July 7, 2010

High Availability MySQL Cookbook review

High Availability MySQL Cookbook (Alex Davies, Packt Publishing) presents different approaches to achieve high availability with MySQL. The bulk of the book is dedicated to MySQL Cluster, with shorter sections on: MySQL replication shared storage block level replication performance tuning The recipes are clear and well explained, based on a CentOS distribution, and it seems [...]

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By fernando | January 26, 2010

how to prevent explain from executing subqueries

Here’s a quick tip for using explain: You may know this already, but mysql will actually execute some subqueries when you invoke explain.  Here’s an example: mysql> explain select id from projects where id = (select max(id) from projects where name like ‘en%’); +—-+————-+———-+——-+—————+———+———+——-+——-+————-+ | id | select_type | table | type | possible_keys | [...]

Topics: MySQL | 2 Comments »
By fernando | August 14, 2009

Generating data with dbmonster

In my last post I included some sample data which was useful for playing around with queries (once I published it, I realized it made my post look like some form of keyword stuffing, fortunately I don’t use adsense on my site so I hope I’m free of any suspicion ). That sample data was [...]

Topics: MySQL | 4 Comments »
By fernando | August 12, 2009

Indexing text columns in MySQL

This time, I’m talking about indexes for string typed columns. In particular, I’ll show a procedure I find useful while looking for good index length values for these columns. I’ll use a sample table called people. Here’s what it looks like: mysql> desc people; +————+——————+——+—–+———+—————-+ | Field | Type | Null | Key | Default [...]

Topics: MySQL | 6 Comments »
By fernando | June 17, 2009

iptables trick to limit concurrent tcp connections

This is sort of a self-documenting post, and a self-support group about ill-behaved tomcat apps. Sometimes, you have multiple nodes accesing your MySQL server (or any kind of server, for that matter) concurrently. Eventually, software in one or more of these nodes might do nasty things (you know who you are buddy:)) MySQL provides a [...]

Topics: MySQL | 3 Comments »
By fernando | April 29, 2009

SOUNDEX(), triggers, and stored procedures

MySQL provides a SOUNDEX() function, which returns the soundex of a given string. For details, refer to the manual, but to put it simply, it allows you to compare strings based on how they sound, hence letting you do proximity searches on your database. If you’re just querying for a word, it’s usage is pretty [...]

By fernando | April 21, 2009

Extending procedure_analyse

My previous post explored a stored procedure that extended procedure_analyse with the intent of helping DBAs optimize table structure. Here’s an improved version. I’ve followed Arjen Lentz‘s suggestion and added support for the max_elements and max_memory parameters. I also added a new Indexed column to the output, which is an ENUM(‘No’,’Yes’,’Overindexed’). Yes and No are [...]

By fernando | April 18, 2009

Making use of procedure analyse()

SELECT Field0[,Field1,Field2,...] FROM TABLE PROCEDURE ANALYSE() is a nice tool to find out more about your table’s columns. Still, it could be improved in a lot of ways, and the stored procedure below is a starting point. It makes use of procedure analyse (though with ‘SELECT * FROM’), and modifies it’s output to include the [...]

Topics: MySQL | 4 Comments »
By fernando | April 15, 2009

Updated mysql-proxy benchmarking script (for proxy 0.7)

My previous post contained a lua script for MySQL proxy that would generate benchmarking information. However, just days (or maybe hours?) after I published it, release 0.7 of mysql-proxy was published, making my script obsolete. I’ve fixed this (it needed just a minor tweak), so here‘s a tarball with the following: trace.lua, which is the [...]

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