SphinX is a great full-text search engine for MySQL. Installing the Sphinx daemon was straightforward as you can compile it from the source or use a .DEB/.RPM package but SphinxSE was a little bit tricky since it needed to be installed as a plugin on a running MySQL server. So if you use Debian or Centos and install your MySQL from a .deb or .rpm package this is how you do it.

http://www.howtoforge.com/sphinx-as-mysql-storage-engine-sphinxse

This comes up in discussions almost every new project I work on, because it's a very important thing to consider when designing a database. When deciding when and how to create an index in your MySQL database, it's important to consider how the data is being used.

http://www.howtoforge.com/when-to-use-indexes-in-mysql-databases

mylvmbackup is a Perl script for quickly creating MySQL backups. It uses LVM's snapshot feature to do so. To perform a backup, mylvmbackup obtains a read lock on all tables and flushes all server caches to disk, creates a snapshot of the volume containing the MySQL data directory, and unlocks the tables again. This article shows how to use it on a Debian Lenny server.

http://www.howtoforge.com/how-to-back-up-mysql-databases-with-mylvmbackup-on-debian-lenny

There are various reasons to set up quick "sandbox" instances of MySQL. You can use them to test different types of replication (such as master-master or various slave topologies), to test your code against different versions of MySQL, or to setup instances of MySQL on a per developer basis where each person has their own database running on a different port so they can breakdown/setup the DB easily or make schema changes without affecting other team members. A perfect tool to do all of these things easily is MySQL Sandbox.

http://www.howtoforge.com/quick-db-setups-with-mysql-sandbox

This tutorial explains how you can set, change and reset (if you've forgotten the password) MySQL root passwords. Time and again I see problems like mysqladmin: connect to server at 'localhost' failed error: 'Access denied for user 'root'@'localhost' (using password: YES)'. So I thought it's time to remind you how to solve MySQL related password problems. If you are just looking for a quick fix how to reset a MySQL root password you can find that at the bottom of this tutorial.

http://www.howtoforge.com/setting-changing-resetting-mysql-root-passwords