The details:
San Francisco
4th December
9:30AM – 5PM

Spaces are limited, so to give everyone a fair chance we’re delaying registration to open at noon tomorrow (Friday) Pacific Time. It’s strictly first in first served, so be quick!  The registration link is here.

Entry posted by Morgan Tocker | One comment

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Morgan has been with us for a while. Before joining Percona, Morgan worked as a Technical Instructor for MySQL (and then Sun Microsystems) in Canada where he taught courses on High Availability, Performance Tuning and Database Administration. He has also previously worked in the MySQL Support Team, and provided DRBD support. Morgan will be focusing on Percona’s new training initiative.

Matt, a.k.a. Big DBA Head, has been working with relational databases since the mid 1990’s as a DBA, System Administrator, and all around techie. Before joining Percona, Matt worked at MySQL and Sun Microsystems as a Solution Architect helping to build architectures for Fortune 500 and Top Alexa rated companies. Matt is the co-founder of the Waffle Grid Project and specializes in cluster, high availability, migrations, and benchmarking. He will be a valuable member of both our consulting and development teams.

Morgan and Matt, a big welcome — we are fortunate indeed that you’re working with us. And… go team!

Entry posted by Ryan Lowe | One comment

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We believe both approaches have their benefits and drawbacks and mixing them right way allows you to get your problems solved most efficient way.

Onsite visits are great as they allow consultant to meet your team in person and great for relationship building. It is great for architecture design and review as you can sit down with the team and use drawing board. It also often allows the best focus both for consultant and for participating team – when consulting visit is arranged it is usually the top priority for some of the staff members which provide consultant with information and assistance he might need.

Onsite visits also often allow to get prompt attention from other team – looking for network engineer to understand network topology or for someone from marketing to get the growth plans – they typically can be brought in for question.

I believe Onsite visits also offer unmatched training experience for the team – one of the team members can work side by side with consultants observing what he does and asking the question about the progress.

The Single Day visits are often extremely valuable as a kick off to do application redesign, for performance review or for starting long term Remote DBA or support relationships. They can be done with little planning as basically for any system there is enough work to spend efficiently understanding the system and working on the pressing problems customer may have. Such visits are often result in a lot of “homework” as application changes or implementing changes on production which when can benefit from remote followups to validate changes and provide further advice.

Multi day onsite visits require a bit more planning to be efficient. Many times in my career I would come to the customer for a week only to find I have created the implementation plan within 1-2 days and it will take a while to implement it and pass it through development and testing stages. Before long onsite visit it is very good to have a call with consultant to understand what exactly needs to be done, how much time and what resources it requires.

Projects which can be efficient as multi day visits are whenever implementation is required (coding unlike giving advice takes a lot of time) – migration projects, any forms of scripting, implementation (writing queries), hands on setting up MySQL, Replication, Monitoring, High Availability with MMM or DRBD are good examples.

Another good example of efficient Multi-Day visit is when there are multiple groups or multiple applications using MySQL – in such case each of the problem areas/groups can gets its own day or few hours which keeps consultant busy.

To make a Multi-Day visit efficient it is important to plan on what will be done – what people will consultant need to work with and which problems do they have. Providing proper access and having staging/test systems available are also often required.

Remote work has a benefit of consultant being available in the short time intervals and being able to multi task.

Working with the customer there are two types of “waits” which are often encountered. First – waiting on the customer. It could be fixing access problems, completing application changes, QA, scheduling downtime to implement changes and millions of other things. Second – waiting on database (or other) operations to complete – backup, restore, ALTER TABLE, load testing – all of these things take time and make consultant to wait for them.

In case you’re working remotely consultant typically has other tasks to do while such long processes are running. If you’re spending time onsite you may have other tasks or you may not while if you’re working remotely there are always things to do.

Another benefit of remote work – it truly allows to engage the team. If you have consultant onsite getting another one with some specific knowledge is complicated while getting another person to login to the system remotely for a quick look is easy and efficient.

Time is another interesting factor – onsite visits usually happen during office hours while changes to production are often avoided. With remote work it is much easier to do work which needs to be done at night hours.

Remote work however also needs to be well organized. The benefit of onsite work is – it is always planned at very specific time. Given date and time consultant will be there so both consultant and customer prepare for the visit. If appointment is just a phone call or online meeting there is larger chance it can be forgotten by ether party. In many cases the remote work not planned to the specific time at all which can cause it to be delayed because of either party delays.

If you need something to be done fast and you’re doing it remotely make sure to plan it to exact time and make sure there is someone to assist consultant if he needs any help such as access issues, some questions about setup or what exactly given queries are doing. Prompt responses can keep the ball rolling much faster.

Another trick to make remote work successful is to be very clear in your instructions especially if you’re not going to be available to assist consultant when he is doing the work. As remote work is often done cross time zones this becomes a very important factor.

In case you have a lot of work done in such “disconnected” mode it is a good idea to have daily/weekly/or be-weekly (depending on project intensity) calls to get team to discuss the progress and generally get team on the same page.

In general surprisingly a lot of things can be done in completely remote mode – we’ve done not only basic optimizations but architecture redesigns, large scale deployment, migrations and high available architectures implementation such a way often surprising customers (in a good way) of how little customers the work took.

The Great Mix As I mentioned before mixing Onsite and Remote work can be indeed the best mix especially for the complex projects. Onsite visit is great to setup relationships, get initial understanding of the system and get initial project planning. After it is done a lot of work can be done remotely quite efficient while there may be the benefit in onsite status-checks and team interactions as well.

Entry posted by peter | One comment

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Here is a list of enhancements in this release:

• Move to MySQL 5.1.33
• Move to InnoDB plugin 1.0.3
• more reliable replication, innodb_overwrite_relay_log_info patch now included in the release
• fix assertions for UNIV_DEBUG
• new fix for rw_lock patch

Percona XtraDB 1.0.3-4 (Sakura) available in source and several binary packages.

XtraDB is compatible with existing InnoDB tables (unless you used innodb_extra_undoslots) and we are going to keep compatibility in further releases. We are open for features requests for new engine and ready to accept community patches. You can monitor Percona’s current tasks and further plans on the Percona XtraDB Launchpad project. You can also request features and report bugs there. Also we have setup two maillists for General discussions and for Development related questions.

Entry posted by Evgeniy Stepchenko | 9 comments

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Entry posted by Morgan Tocker | 4 comments

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So I prepared binaries for our Build13 (which I actually did not announce to not spam PlanetMySQL a lot, I will figure out another channel for announcements), and you can get it there http://www.percona.com/mysql/5.0.77-b13/deb/, and your feedback is welcome!

As for changes for Build13 it contains InnoDB Data Dictionary restriction patch, which I mentioned before (http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2009/02/11/limiting-innodb-data-dictionary/).

Speaking of deb binaries I tried to keep it compatible with native deb binaries, but I had to make some changes:

1. There was strange configure parameters

which I was not sure how to interpret, so I removed any mentioning of embedded server as 5.0 actually is not supposed to work in embedded mode and our patches can't be compiled in this case.

2. I removed NDB cluster engine from builds, we have not tested combination of our patches with NDB so I really do not know how it works together.

Enjoy!

Entry posted by Vadim | 7 comments

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Here is a list of enhancements:

• Move to MySQL 5.1.31
• Scalability fix — ability to use several rollback segments

Increasing the number of rseg may be helpful for CPU scale of write-intentional workloads. See benchmark results.

• Scalability fix — replaced page_hash mutex to page_hash read-write lock. See benchmark results.
• Fix broken group commit in InnoDB

As you know, the group commit of InnoDB doesn't work after MySQL 5.0 with binlog.
We pretend to fix this and added "innodb_enable_unsafe_group_commit=[0|1]" parameter. Note if you set this parameter to "1" record order of binlog and InnoDB transaction log could be not same. But because InnoDB manages transactions in correct order most users may not have problem with this.

• New parameters in the XtraDB io patches:
  • innodb_ibuf_max_size — Restrict innodb-insert-buffer size
  • innodb_ibuf_active_contract — Enabling it makes the each user threads positive to contract the insert buffer as possible in asynchronous
  • innodb_ibuf_accel_rate — This parameter is additional tuning the amount of insert buffer processing by background thread.
  • innodb_flush_neighbor_pages — When you use the storage which don't have "head seek latency" (e.g. SSD or enough Write-Buffered), 0 may show better performance.
• Changed parameter for control read ahead activity. Now it accepts string values:
  • innodb_read_ahead = [none|random|linear|both]
• Deb builds for Ubuntu

Percona XtraDB 1.0.2-3 (Sapporo) available in source and several binary packages.

XtraDB is compatible with existing InnoDB tables (unless you used innodb_extra_undoslots) and we are going to keep compatibility in further releases. We are open for features requests for new engine and ready to accept community patches. You can monitor Percona’s current tasks and further plans on the Percona XtraDB Launchpad project. You can also request features and report bugs there. Also we have setup two maillists for General discussions and for Development related questions.

Entry posted by Evgeniy Stepchenko | 10 comments

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Let me explain a little about what we're looking for at the moment. While we do have a career path for less experienced people, right now we are looking for people who are top-level, senior experts in LAMP/Open-Source performance and scalability. Most of our work involves MySQL (at least peripherally, usually centrally) but not all of it; and we are looking for a PostgreSQL expert as well as systems administration and operations skills. If you're also an expert in a related technology (e.g. Hadoop, popular cloud platforms, or some other component that you might expect to see at the Percona Performance Conference) we'd like to talk with you.

What's it like to work at Percona? To begin with, it's about creating value for people. Any successful business exchange has to leave all parties better off than they started. Our priorities are clear: there are two groups of people (employees and customers) and both must be first priority. It sounds like a paradox, but it works due to the company structure and the way we've assigned responsibilities. If you'd like to know how, email me personally and I'll share the details.

Your peers will be talented and experienced professionals. You can expect very challenging work, and very good pay and benefits. Our clients bring us a lot of different types of work. It is not all remote DBA, nor is it all urgent troubleshooting or performance audits; it's everything you can imagine, and it's never the same from day to day. Fix my RAID controller! Why isn't my firewall working? Optimize the query! Find and fix security problem in my application. Calculate when I'll outgrow the server! Can you benchmark my application? Make me a new database user. Audit my application and tell me how to make it run faster. You are responsible for day-to-day operations of my whole backend and you have my IT team at your disposal. Please set up redundant failover and good backups!

We all work remotely, from our homes. There is currently not much required travel for most of us; a few of us do onsite work because of where we live, but most of us don't (note that we do meet together at least yearly, and we go to conferences and other events). But we don't require most consultants to be ready to travel 80% of the time.

We do not hire consultants in the way a lot of other consulting companies do. You do not become a "Percona franchisee," you are an employee, although the legal structures vary from country to country. You don't have to go find your own clients or keep your own billing systems like you do at some consulting companies.

The successful Percona consultant has a combination of experience, aptitude and attitude. You must be a technical expert of the highest caliber. You have to be a fast learner who pushes to learn new things. You have to be great with people; good communication and deep understanding of the customer's needs is mandatory. You have to be willing to work really hard at unfamiliar things. You have to be able to manage your time, manage large quantities of email and a ton of other distractions, work with a variety of perhaps unfamiliar tools such as our Eventum CRM system, and communicate well. The most important thing is a fanatical attitude of customer-first; we have to understand the customer's needs deeply. We have an entire process built around making sure we learn, document and act on what's important to the customer and how they want us to accomplish it. This is not a cookie-cutter job where you can just apply some formula and follow the ten-step recipe to fill in a report like they do at Jiffy Lube. And finally, there's a magical ingredient I can't describe -- it either works or it doesn't. This Percona consulting is a real culture shock, even if you think you're used to working in this fashion.

That last paragraph sounds like standard text for a job ad, but we mean it (notice that we do not require "proficiency with Microsoft Office"). You cannot fake it in this job. We generally start off with a try-it-out period of several months to see how things go.

Due to the above considerations and our growing demand, we're particularly interested in people who might have a shorter start-up time, perhaps those who have experience working from their home for an email/IRC/chat/phone based support or consulting organization.

If you think you're a good candidate, please fill out the contact form on our website. Thanks!

Entry posted by Baron Schwartz | 2 comments

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In order to forestall speculations and prevent people from jumping to unwarranted negative conclusions, I'd like to take a moment and explain the story behind this event. Some of you have noticed that there were no sessions from Percona this year on the schedule for the 2009 MySQL Conference and Expo. This is not because we didn't propose any sessions this year; Peter, Vadim, and the rest of us at Percona submitted over a dozen session proposals, which were initially declined. As a result, we conceived and organized another conference. We reserved a hotel near the MySQL conference, planned the event, invited speakers, etc. Then O'Reilly and MySQL graciously and unexpectedly proposed that we bring our conference into the Hyatt and present it in the same venue with the MySQL conference (official announcement from Kaj). They also accepted three of our original session proposals into the MySQL conference. We appreciated this fair and generous gesture and accepted their offer. We will be participating in all aspects of the conference, including the community events such as the dot-org pavilion and the MySQL Camp that Sheeri Kritzer Cabral is organizing.

That's the back story -- now on to the Percona Performance Conference! This is not "another MySQL conference." It's a performance conference. It's true that we are among the world's foremost experts on MySQL, InnoDB, and XtraDB, and it's true that the database is usually harder to scale than other components in an application. But ultimately you don't only care that your database is fast -- you care that your application is fast as a whole. That's why we'll have sessions from experts on many aspects of high-performance applications, not just the database component. And we'll have experts on different databases too.

This is a technical event that's free to attend even if you're not attending the MySQL conference. We expect to see a lot of people who live locally, and we know that the easy accessibility for attendees of the MySQL Conference and Expo will add value to their trip to Santa Clara.

We will not be the only ones speaking at Percona Performance Conference; other experts will join us in making presentations too. You'll be able to hear sessions from such luminaries as Monty Widenius (creator of MySQL), Brian Aker (creator of Drizzle), Andrew Aksyonoff (creator of Sphinx), Mark Callaghan (database guru at Google), and many others. If you'd like to propose a session, please do so through the Percona Performance Conference website.

The Percona team looks forward to greeting you face to face this April in Santa Clara.

Entry posted by Baron Schwartz | 5 comments

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Ryan Lowe initially joined us from Florida (USA) in June. In his previous lives he scaled an Alexa top 1000 site with a sharded MySQL backend, worked in aerospace, worked in telecom, and lots of other things. His background as a consultant, DBA (with Oracle, too!), DBA manager, and programmer makes him a great match for Percona's clients. He also contributed some improvements to Wordpress, and he blogs here and on Pablowe.

Vladimir Fedorkov joins us from Lipetsk in the Russian Federation. (Brrr!) Vladimir and Peter have known each other and worked together for years in past endeavors. Vladimir can make Sphinx do just about anything, and is an expert systems administrator too. (Did you know that we provide systems administration services to our clients? It's not all about query optimization.) Vladimir is also the leader of one of our groups of consultants (codename: Mercury) and is helping us solidify core parts of our services offerings.

Vladimir and Ryan, a big welcome -- we are fortunate indeed you're working with us. And... go team!

PS: I can't help but triple-dip, and point out that our own Ewen Fortune has been a MySQL Cluster Certified DBA for quite a long time now. OK, shameless plug over. And, congratulations Nicklas!

Entry posted by Baron Schwartz | 3 comments

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