OpenAlfa Blog

A system administrator or DBA may need to connect quite often to a MySQL database from the command line, to perform administration and optimization tasks, and such. The common way to connect is executing the mysql client, with a set of arguments to specify the user and password to use, as well as the host, database and port where the instance is listening.

This post explains how to specify de defaults for all these arguments in a configuration file, to avoid having to type it again and again, every time a new connection to the database needs to be made.

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In a default MySQL installation on a Linux system, the MySQL data files are located under the /var/lib/mysql directory.

But on many Linux systems, this location might not be the best place. If the system disk is partitioned into several partitions, the size of file system where the ‘/var/lib/mysql’ directory belongs might not be dimensioned to hold the required databases.

Fixing this issue is easy, as explained in this post.

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In a previous post we have seen how to tell the storage type of a MySQL table, by means of a SQL query or with phpMyAdmin.

This post explains how to change the storage type of a table. Also in this case, this can be done by means of a SQL sentence, or using the phpMyAdmin frontend.

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Sometimes, the system administrator may find that a user, or application, has started the execution of a SQL sentence that is taking minutes, hours or even days to execute. This may happen for large databases where a suitable index has not been defined to speed up the query. The long running query may be taking a large amount of the available CPU and memory resources, hindering the normal execution of other applications and services running in the system. Killing the offending application does not help, as the query continues being executed by the database server.

This post explains how to identify and kill the MySQL process that is running the query, without affecting other operations that the database server might be performing in response to requests issued by other applications.

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phpMyAdmin is probably the most well-known database management tool for MySQL databases. Besides allowing the administrator to browse the objects in the database through a graphical web frontend, phpMyAdmin also mase easy to carry out many common DBA maintenance tasks. This post explains how to install and configure phpMyAdmin on a Linux distro. Continue reading »