phpMyAdmin can be used to export or backup MySQL databases easily. However, if the database size is very big, it probably won’t be a good idea. phpMyAdmin allows users to save database dump as file or display on screen, which involves exporting SQL statements from the server, and transmitting the data across slower network connection or Internet to user’s computer. This process slow the exporting process, increase database locking time and thus MySQL unavailability, slow the server and may simply crash the Apache HTTPD server if too many incoming web connections hogging the system’s resources.

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When creating a new table or altering an existing table with primary keys, unique constraints and indexes, or when defining a new index with Alter Table manipulation statement in MySQL database, the following error may occur and prohibit the the command from completing:

ERROR 1170 (42000): BLOB/TEXT column ‘field_name’ used in key specification without a key length

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Another useful string function in MySQL database is TRIM() which will return a text string after removing the matching leading or trailing characters, also known as prefixes or suffixes. It’s been described by MySQL reference as function that returns the string str with all remstr prefixes or suffixes removed. If none of the specifiers BOTH, LEADING, or TRAILING is given, BOTH is assumed. remstr is optional and, if not specified, spaces are removed.

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MySQL database has a handy and simple string function REPLACE() that allows table data with the matching string (from_string) to be replaced by new string (to_string). This is useful if there is need to search and replace a text string which affects many records or rows, such as change of company name, postcode, URL or spelling mistake.

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Oracle databases reserve some special characters with specific meaning and purpose within Oracle environment. These reserved characters include _ (underscore) wild card character which used to match exactly one character, % (percentage) which used to match zero or more occurrences of any characters and ‘ (apostrophe or quotation mark) which used to mark the value supplied. These special characters will not be interpreted literally when building SQL query in Oracle, and may caused error in results returned especially when performing string search with LIKE keyword. To use these characters so that Oracle can interpret them literally as a part of string value instead of preset mean, escape character has to be assigned.

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In Oracle, PostgreSQL, DB2 and SQLite database system, there is a nice command feature called Create Table As which allows easy duplicating of a table with data from another or a few other tables. The SQL command can also be used to ‘copy and paste’ a table exactly or backup a table data before performing data manipulation query on the original table, just in case the script has error and the backup date can be used to restore to original state. Create Table As will creates a new table built from the content of dataset or result set retrieved by a Select SQL query from a table that already exists within the database.

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If you enable slow queries log of MySQL database server, you will notice that from the slow query log file contains only SQL statements and queries that took more than query_time of 10 seconds to execute or run. This is the default value or query time threshold for log_slow_queries function, which is 10 seconds. 10 seconds is way too long for a SQL query to complete, so the value may be too high to capture any meaningful data. You can alter or change the slow query time to lower value or number of seconds.

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One of the main requirements for a fast web server is to has efficient and effective SQL statements or queries that are optimized. Any non-optimal SQL (Structured Query Language) commands or statements that take too long or lengthy time to execute will use up a lot of system resources, causing MySQL database to run slower, and then more and more queries backlogs queuing up, and when connection limit is reached, visitors are been denied or refused connection. In worst case scenario, your web server will go down as well, or continuously underperform. The case is especially true when you are using MyISAM table type which uses table-level locking instead of row-level locking in a high traffic website.

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