May 23, 2013

Keynotes, BOFs, and the Community Networking Reception at Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo

The Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo begins next Monday and runs April 22-25, 2013. Attendees will see great keynotes from leaders in the industry including representatives from Oracle, Amazon Web Services, HP, Continuent, and Percona. They can also participate in thought provoking Birds of a Feather sessions on Tuesday night and the Wednesday night [...]

MySQL 5.6 vs MySQL 5.5 and the Star Schema Benchmark

So far most of the benchmarks posted about MySQL 5.6 use the sysbench OLTP workload.  I wanted to test a set of queries which, unlike sysbench, utilize joins.  I also wanted an easily reproducible set of data which is more rich than the simple sysbench table.  The Star Schema Benchmark (SSB) seems ideal for this. [...]

InnoDB Full-text Search in MySQL 5.6 (part 1)

I’ve never been a very big fan of MyISAM; I would argue that in most situations, any possible advantages to using MyISAM are far outweighed by the potential disadvantages and the strengths of InnoDB. However, up until MySQL 5.6, MyISAM was the only storage engine with support for full-text search (FTS). And I’ve encountered many [...]

Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo 2013: The talks I want to see

I’ve been woefully neglectful of my responsibilities to post regularly about Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo 2013 (PLCME 2013), but here’s some highlights of what I am planning to attend from the schedule.  Read to the very bottom for the chance to win a free full pass to the conference! When picking talks to attend, [...]

New Keynote Speakers and Sponsors and Applications Open for DotOrg Pavilion for Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo

I’m pleased to announce the first of the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo 2013 keynote speakers and new sponsors including Amazon Web Services, Google, Clustrix, Scalebase, PalominoDB, Database Trends & Applications, and Linux Journal. We are also now accepting applications for the DotOrg Pavilion. Also, nominations are now being accepted for the 2013 MySQL [...]

Initial Keynote Speakers for the Percona Live MySQL Conference & the MySQL Community Awards

I’m pleased to announce the initial list of keynote speakers for the Percona Live MySQL Conference & Expo, April 22-25 in Santa Clara, California. The conference promises great content with over 90 speakers in more than 110 sessions, 15 tutorials, and multiple keynotes. The MySQL Community Awards 2013 are also now accepting nominations. And do [...]

Sell-an-Elephant-to-your-Boss-HOWTO

Spoiler alert: If your boss does not need an elephant, he is definitely NOT going to buy one from you. If he will, he will regret it and eventually you will too. I must appologize to the reader who was expecting to find an advice on selling useless goods to his boss. While I do [...]

MySQL Indexing Best Practices: Webinar Questions Followup

I had a lot of questions on my MySQL Indexing: Best Practices Webinar (both recording and slides are available now) We had lots of questions. I did not have time to answer some and others are better answered in writing anyway. Q: One developer on our team wants to replace longish (25-30) indexed varchars with [...]

How To Test Your Upgrades – pt-upgrade

Upgrades are usually one of the biggest part of any database infrastructure maintenance. Even with enough planning something else can go bad after sending your production application to the version you’ve upgraded to. Let’s look at how one Percona Toolkit tool, pt-upgrade can help you identify what to expect and test your upgrades better which [...]

dbqp and Xtrabackup testing

So I’m back from the Percona dev team’s recent meeting.  While there, we spent a fair bit of time discussing Xtrabackup development.  One of our challenges is that as we add richer features to the tool, we need equivalent testing capabilities.  However, it seems a constant in the MySQL world that available QA tools often [...]