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As with any open source software, anyone can download MySQL sources, build binaries for some platforms and distribute their own packages. So we have the official ones from Oracle, MariaDB, and Percona - the makers of MySQL and its forks respectively. There are also those distributed with operating systems or that are available for install from their standard repositories. Some people or groups also create packages out of the most recent versions of various software and make them available to the world. Finally, some mash up a vanilla MySQL with various patches creating even more options. What to choose?

Have you ever spent a lot of time thinking about how to install and configure a Linux server for MySQL database? I will try to highlight all the critical steps and some of the decisions you may need to make.

I must admint I was greatly impressed by the Oracle activity on MySQL yesterday. I cannot say I didn't see it was coming, but most certainly the magnitude of what happened, the flood of announcements, was a bit overwhelming. Looking at the list of improvements, I started wondering what can it actually mean to the MySQL ecosystem.

MySQL performance is largely defined by keys and how efficiently queries can use them. As you scale, at certain point it isn't enough anymore to just have any indexes and still get a good performance in return. You have to really figure them out and allow your queries to do less work, as little work as possible. The approach presented in this article can sometimes help designing such good, efficient indexes. As a consultant, I have to rely on it myself from time to time, having to optimize a query that works in a database I know nothing about.

When an application runs a query in MySQL, from time to time, it may receive various errors. Some are related to syntax errors in the query text itself, some occur because the statement attempted an illegal operation such as for example writing a duplicate value into a column with unique constraint. But there are a few that are not as easy to figure out, because they have no direct relationship with the actual work being done. One of such error messages reads "Lost connection to MySQL server during query". What does it actually mean? If it appears frequently, how to diagnose what the problem may be?