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 [...]
Election night
Today was epoch day in American history. Maybe even most important day this year, but it’s not what I’d like to write about here. What does it mean for US citizens and all other people around the world? We know, but what does it mean for us – IT professionals and/or internet portals serving news [...]
Percona welcomes Ewen Fortune and Piotr Biel
Although we haven’t announced any new members in a while, the Percona team has continued to grow steadily behind the scenes. Our hiring policy is to have a few months’ provisional period to ensure the…, of course. Ewen has been a consultant and contractor before joining Percona, and has many years of experience in Oracle, MySQL, Unix systems ….
Piotr Biel lives in Poland, quite close to our other Polish team member (Maciek Dobrzanski). In his past as a system architect he … can do!
Ewen and Piotr, a very warm welcome to the Percona team from all of us, and we are so glad to …
Percona turns two today !
July 31st 2006 was my last day working for MySQL and August 1st I started what later was incorporated Percona with Vadim joining me September 1st as co-founder. Two years is a significant anniversary for any startup – surviving (and being profitable) for 2 years can be seen as validation of our business model and [...]
Report from OSCON 2008
So I’m back from OSCON 2008. As usually it is fun conference to attend. Though I could only come for couple of days (Wed/Thu) as things are too busy here. Same as previous year I would note the conference is not as much backend and high performance focused as MySQL Conference or even Velocity, though [...]
Percona builds with Percona patchsets
Percona has a strong team of MySQL developers and consultants on board, so we decided to prepare builds with our patches and third-party patches which we think are very useful. We actually use these internally and for our customers. Current releases include: microslow patch (enables microsecond resolution in slow logs) execution plan (show info about [...]
Can having information public hurt consulting business ?
People frequently ask me if the fact we keep information public can hurt our consulting business ? Lets keep aside for the moment amount of new business publishing this information brings to us but think it also have significant negative effect because people find information on MySQL Performance Blog and use it instead of purchasing [...]
A note about Pythian
On Monday I had a chance to have a chat with Paul Vallee from Pythian. This was quite an enlightening talk, and I was very impressed by Paul openness and willing to share with me a lot of internal operations details. I wish there would be more people out where as open and helpful even [...]
Economics of Performance Optimization
I think every person responsible for Development or Operations of growing application sooner or later have to decide on couple few questions on how to tackle application performance. These questions are: Should we Optimize Application or get more Hardware ? Should we do things ourselves or hire an experts to help us ? The answer [...]
MySQL Consulting – Being on your own
About half a year have passed since me and Vadim have left MySQL to do MySQL Consulting on our own. Bunch of people have been wondering about our experiences so I thought it would be worth to share it here.

