lefred blog: tribulations of a MySQL Evangelist

As a DBA, disk space has always worried me. In fact, the biggest problem for a MySQL/MariaDB DBA is the large, fragmented InnoDB Tablespaces. It was even more problematic when a single tablespace handled everything. But even with a tablespace per table (innodb_file_per_table=ON) fragmentation on large tables can still be an issue and waste disk […]

MariaDB 13.1 introduces the long-awaited `->` and `->>` JSON operators, together with `FORMAT JSON` support in `JSON_TABLE()`. Discover how these improvements simplify JSON queries, preserve nested objects and arrays, and improve compatibility with MySQL applications.

When we talk about extending a database server, we usually think about features that could benefit a very large number of users. A new authentication mechanism, a storage engine, an audit plugin, a new generic data type such as UUID or INET, additional JSON functions… these are relatively easy to justify because their potential audience […]

Names are important. They help us identify people, projects, products, pets, database servers, and occasionally the correct bug tracker. This may sound obvious, but the database world has spent more than fifteen years proving that it is not. MySQL and MariaDB share a substantial amount of history, syntax, tooling, knowledge, applications, and community. They also […]

Reversing Transactions Directly from the Binary Log Some ideas never completely disappear. They remain somewhere in your brain, waiting for the right opportunity—or the right API—to come back. For me, recovering rows from the binary log is one of those ideas. More than ten years ago, I started experimenting with a simple question: If row-based […]