WYLUG

MySQL is a very popular DBMS.  Or rather, it’s very widely used, which is not necessarily the same thing.  It has quite a few quirks, behaviour that many people wouldn’t expect and which if you aren’t aware of can be the cause of much frustration, pain, and data loss.

In the hope that more people being aware of these infelicities will reduce the damage they can do, a collection of them is presented here, along with tips and techniques for dealing with them.

There’s also an examination of why so often the MySQL feature is tantalizingly only available in one version higher than the one you’re running.

For those that dont know, Smylers was a founding member of Wylug, and after a period exiled to London returned to Leeds last year when he persuaded his employer to invent a position for him.  So he’s now Hosting Analyst for web hosting and domain names provider Webfusion — a job title so vague he
pretty much gets to make it up as he goes along.  Previously he was Head of Perl Training at GBdirect, where he taught Perl to Yahoo!, Microsoft, Sony, and the Nationwide building society among others, and was the lead developer for top UK IT news website ‘The Register’.