May 25, 2013

Baron Schwartz interviewed on WebPulp.tv

There’s an interview with Baron Schwartz (that’s me) on WebPulp.tv. Topics include the history of Percona’s software such as Percona Server (our version of the MySQL database server) and XtraBackup, what we do at Percona, what tools we use to do it, how to think logically about performance optimization, what ugly surprises happen when you [...]

Interviews for InfiniDB and TokuDB are next

I forwarded on a list of questions about PBXT to Paul McCullagh today.  While Paul’s busy answering them, I’d like to announce that Robert Dempsey (InfiniDB storage engine) and Bradley C. Kuszmaul (TokuDB storage engine) have also accepted an interview. If you have any questions about either storage engine, please post them here by Friday [...]

Would you like to ask a question about PBXT?

In the next week, I’ll be interviewing Paul McCullagh, the architect behind the PBXT storage engine. If you have any questions for Paul, please post them here by Monday 16th November. Note: The idea for this interview was inspired by a previous interview with Heikki Tuuri – creator of InnoDB. You can see the answers [...]

What does Using filesort mean in MySQL?

If you were interviewing to work at Percona, and I asked you “what does Using filesort mean in EXPLAIN,” what would you say? I have asked this question in a bunch of interviews so far, with smart people, and not one person has gotten it right. So I consider it to be a bad interview [...]

MySQL and Sun – Oportunity for smaller companies ?

Reading Martens interview we see the quite: “As soon as the deal closed we immediately secured a big deal with a major European national police agency,” said Mickos, now SVP database products at Sun. “Key to them choosing MySQL was that we are now part of a much larger public corporation. The deal wouldn’t have [...]

Innodb Performance Optimization Basics

Interviewing people for our Job Openings I like to ask them a basic question – if you have a server with 16GB of RAM which will be dedicated for MySQL with large Innodb database using typical Web workload what settings you would adjust and interestingly enough most people fail to come up with anything reasonable. [...]

What to tune in MySQL Server after installation

My favorite question during Interview for people to work as MySQL DBAs or be involved with MySQL Performance in some way is to ask them what should be tuned in MySQL Server straight after installation, assuming it was installed with default settings. I’m surprised how many people fail to provide any reasonable answer to this [...]