Re: Any tips for an MS SQL DBA trying to break into MySQL?

[Erik Haselhofer]

I'll try.

> - Is there an SSMS type tool for MySQL? I've
> tried MySQL Workbench but it just seems clunky.
> Also if possible i"d love to find something that
> works in Windows, Linux, and OSX since I live in
> all three worlds.

SSMS is a good tool. I haven't seen anything that rivals it in MySQL. There may be some commercial versions of products that are deeper than the free one's so maybe one of those does. Most of what I do is at the command line and a fair amount of it was using phpmyadmin (most people here hate it, I think). I had the same reaction to Workbench.

> - Can someone recommend books or online resources
> about indexing and performance tuning?

High Performance MySQL

It's a few years old though. The online documentation is another place to go.

One of the regular posters here, Peter Brawley has a book he's written as well.

> - I use Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services
> and love it, is there any equivalent tool for
> MySQL whether by Oracle or someone else?

There are a ton of report writers out there. Most of them should connect and play with MySQL well enough. I don't believe there is anything all that special in SSRS but I've never really dug into it. It's on the agenda though.

Actually, I'm pretty sure that I had SQL Server and MySQL playing together on my local machine as a linked server. I can't promise that it would work but you might be able to use SSRS with a MySQL database with a little creativity and luck.

> - What about equivalent troubleshooting tools in
> MySQL like these in MS SQL: information_schema,
> SQL Profiler, DBCC SHOWCONTIG, etc.

Same kind of stuff, just different names. SQL Server is probably a bit richer. MySQL is remarkably functional and it's always seemed really clean to me.

> - Also any good books or resources showing how
> MySQL works under the hood? I'm familiar with the
> tree/leaf method of how MS SQL works with indexes
> but what about MySQL?

See the comments above.

> - What about data warehousing? MS SQL has
> Analysis Services, but are there any tools either
> built into MySQL or maybe industry standard tools
> for business intelligence?

It's kind of the same answer I gave above. Go 3rd party. I actually rolled a bunch of those on my own using PHP but there are things like QlikView, Jaspersoft, Pentaho and a bunch more that'll get the job done.

Microsoft adds all of that into the product and you pay for it there, MySQL doesn't have it in the base package so if you want it you buy it then you pay for it.

Hope this helped.