May 23, 2013

What I’m looking forward to at Percona Live (MySQL Users Conference)

This is my 10th year attending and speaking at the MySQL Users Conference (as the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo was originally called back in 2003), and for me it does not get tiring. So what is there in this conference for me as an attendee, speaker and businessman? Learning. First and foremost the conference [...]

Percona Toolkit 2.0.1 and 1.0.2 released

I’m happy to announce that we’ve released Percona Toolkit 2.0.1, a major new version of our essential DBA toolkit, as well as a minor bugfix update to the old 1.0.x series. You can download it from the project homepage, or install it through our RPM and DEB repositories. Documentation is online (and the 1.0 docs [...]

How Percona strives to remain neutral and independent

Many of the prominent companies in the MySQL ecosystem are Percona customers, including hardware manufacturers, software developers, hosted service providers, and appliance developers. We perform paid and unpaid research on their products, and we publish blog posts related to their products or services. Independence and objectivity are core Percona values. How do we balance the [...]

When should you store serialized objects in the database?

A while back Friendfeed posted a blog post explaining how they changed from storing data in MySQL columns to serializing data and just storing it inside TEXT/BLOB columns. It seems that since then, the technique has gotten more popular with Ruby gems now around to do this for you automatically.

KISS KISS KISS

When I visit customers quite often they tell me about number of creative techniques they heard on the conferences, read on the blogs, forums and Internet articles and they ask me if they should use them. My advice is frequently – do not. It is fun to be creative but creative solutions also means unproven [...]

How much memory can MySQL use in the worst case?

I vaguely recall a couple of blog posts recently asking something like “what’s the formula to compute mysqld’s worst-case maximum memory usage?” Various formulas are in wide use, but none of them is fully correct. Here’s why: you can’t write an equation for it.

How Percona does a MySQL Performance Audit

Our customers or prospective customers often ask us how we do a performance audit (it’s our most popular service). I thought I should write a blog post that will both answer their question, so I can just reply “read all about it at this URL” and share our methodology with readers a little bit. This [...]

MySQL 5.1 is to reach GA state – all to arms !

MySQL 5.1 was in RC stage for around 10 months now finally planned to be released as GA soon. As Monty Says MySQL 5.1.26 will be renamed as GA if no serious bugs are discovered. Lets help MySQL to ensure GA release will be indeed GA quality and support Monty in his call to ensure [...]

Innodb usability and ease of use.

It always surprised me how little Innodb team seems to think about product usability/ease of use, when it comes to settings, performance management etc. I could understand many things 5 years ago, like a lot of information being available only in hard to parse SHOW INNODB STATUS output or even uglier hacks with creating tables [...]

Commodity Hardware, Commodity Software and Commodity People

In the previous post I mentioned not all architectures and solutions work for Commodity People, and people seems to agree with me. Number of vendors would claim they are in Commodity Software or Hardware business but few would probably mention they are doing it for Commodity People, because few people would like to be called [...]