June 18, 2009

Announcing Percona.tv

Posted by Ryan Lowe

Today marks the official launch of Percona.tv. We’ll be uploading technical screencasts, conference video, and anything else cool we can think up. If you’ve got ideas or requests, let us know and we’ll do our best to accommodate!

May 21, 2009

Open Development vs Making a Big Splash

Posted by peter

I find it very interesting how Sun does not get the very basic principle of true community Open Source development - you’ve got to give up on making a big splash.

Traditional close source company often develop product in the secret and when it comes out as a surprise for computers and making a big splash for the users. Does it remind you something ? Yes! this is exactly how Innodb Plugin was released last year or MySQL 5.4 performance improvements this year.

Community did not know about them and did not participate early in this efforts.

Another big splash which seems to be planned later this year is “Performance Schema” - which is in development for years as this post claims but to date there is no code for community to play with
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May 20, 2009

MySQL Pays attention to Bugs (Finally!)

Posted by peter

I should say I can see results of new engineering/refactoring/bug hunt efforts inside Sun/MySQL.
Over last couple of weeks I started getting a lot of messages from the bugs system about bugs I reported long ago which were deferred to be fixed later or were left in open state. Here is example of such a bug.

I really hope this effort will result in a lot of these old annoyances fixed, which really matches my vision for MySQL - we do not need more big features we need old ones to work well and be convenient.

May 13, 2009

Open Database Alliance - allies welcome

Posted by peter

Percona and Monty Programming AB announced formation of Open Database Alliance. Read on press release for details.

MySQL Meetups Sponsorship Available

Posted by peter

As you know Sun/MySQL and MeetUp.com could not agree on terms of the sponsorship and so now all MySQL meetup organizers have to pay for their Meetups or move them to the different location. Facebook is suggested as one of alternatives.

I’m not to take any sides in this story and judge who is wrong and who is right but I think it is quite a bad situation to be forced to move off meetup with just a 7 days notice. It may be good idea to host communities in the space which does not make organizers dependent on the sponsor but I think Meetup organizers deserve more time to arrange the move.

We spoke with Jeremy Cole and agreed it will be a good idea to offer the sponsorship MySQL Meetup organizers looking to stick with Meetup.com a little longer. You can read Jeremy’s posts on the same matter here.

P.S I just found out Open Query also offers Sponsorship so it looks like refugees will have a significant choice :)

April 27, 2009

The Percona Performance Presentations Are Online

Posted by Ryan Lowe

The 2009 Percona Performance Conference finished up last week, and was overall a resounding success. Thanks to all of the speakers, O’Reilly, and Sun/MySQL for help making it happen! Most slides have been uploaded; look for the stragglers over the next couple of days.

April 20, 2009

Meet the faces of Percona this week in Santa Clara

Posted by morgan

This year we’ve assembled a team of seven Perconian representatives for the MySQL Conference & Expo/Percona Performance Conference. If you like a particular blog post we’ve written over the last year, have any other feedback, or just want to say hello - we’d like to meet you!

The Percona Team
From left to right; Morgan, Ewen, Baron, Vadim, Peter, Tom, Ryan.

We’ll be at the Percona Performance Conference (Wed & Thur), at the Percona booth inside the exhibition hall (Tue & Wed), and at the Maatkit booth in the dot-org pavilion.   Feel free to bring your technical questions to booth #528, where a consultant will be available.   We’ll try our best to help you for the price of a free beer!  :)

March 24, 2009

2009 Percona Performance Conference Schedule

Posted by Ryan Lowe

The schedule for the 2009 Percona Performance Conference has been released. Take a look, see what interests you, and (optionally) register to come. We look forward to seeing you all there!

Sphinx Technologies launches Sphinx Support

Posted by peter

A couple of weeks ago Sphinx Technologies, a company behind Sphinx Full Text Search Engine launched Sphinx Support Packages which I think is a great value for everyone using Sphinx in Production. This is also a great way to support the project and get something in return - even if you’re not actively using support it looks better than donation for accounting people.
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March 17, 2009

Converting Character Sets

Posted by Ryan Lowe

The web is going the way of utf8.  Drizzle has chosen it as the default character set, most back-ends to websites use it to store text data, and those who are still using latin1 have begun to migrate their databases to utf8.  Googling for “mysql convert charset to utf8″ results in a plethora of sites, each with a slightly different approach, and each broken in some respect.  I’ll outline those approaches here and show why they don’t work, and then present a script that can generically be used to convert a database (or set of tables) to a target character set and collation.

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