MySQL

Some time ago I was in the situation where I was looking at 200 MyISAM tables screaming to get converted to InnoDB for performance reasons. You probably know that MyISAM is better at fulltext searches and such, but what I needed was this database stop locking entire tables when I was just doing row-level interactions. Here's how I did in one go.

If you want to do command-line MySQL administration like restoring databases or dumping statistics, you need the root account and it's password. Or do you?

Sometimes MySQL needs to work hard. I've been working on an import script that fires a lot of INSERTs. Normally our database server handles 1,000 inserts / sec. That wasn't enough. So I went looking for methods to improve the speed of MySQL inserts and was finally able to increase this number to 28,000 inserts per second. Checkout my late night benchmarking adventures.

Sorry folks, this article was based on flawed benchmark results, I will soon post an update!

Recently I had to migrate all MySQL databases from one server to another. This was a one time only operation, so setting up replication wasn't an option. And restoring a backup on the new server involved more downtime than strictly necessary. I figured the most ideal way would be to dump the active MySQL directly into the new MySQL instance. And that's what I did.