If you’re like me and are a DBA in the UK with a penchant for MySQL or Oracle, you’ll know we have a smörgåsbord of conferences here next week. We’ve been waiting, and like buses two have come at once. We have the UK Oracle User Group Conference 2012, in Birmingham on 3rd – 5th [...]

Andrew Moore and Ben Mildren return from Ottawa to Bristol to London all in the name of MySQL

A client of ours is just getting started with Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) and I wonder as time marches on how popular this cloud solution is going to play out for them and Amazon as a valid/useable service offering. Many times in the past we have encountered off-the-shelf solutions from vendor A based on [...]

Another interesting day today, I was attending the keynotes and I have found them quite interesting. Specially the way Tweeter use MySQL to build-up a nosql solution, jokes a side I take few notes on things I must analyze and dig in. Interesting one was also the introduction of the Paypal models, which brings me [...]

I attend five session today and I think some of them were very interesting. Like the one on the Optimizer insight, quite informative and accurate. The other one done by the MySQL Cluster (NDB) group on the installer and new Javascript API interface, left me a little bit … foggy. Why? Because in my mind [...]

It is exciting to be here, meeting again old friends and ex colleagues, but also exciting for what seems the start of a very significant conference fro MySQL. I really enjoy the introductions done from Edward Screven and Thomas Ulin. Edward highlight the fact that MySQL is increasing his presence in the market and in [...]

Every time I have had the pleasure of attending Oracle Open World, I have discovered a plethora of technical heavy-weights from all over the world in attendance. I enjoy meeting and shmoozing with these people almost as much as absorbing the technical content of the show itself. Many of my Pythian colleagues are presenting at [...]

In honour of our fifteenth anniversary, I have assembled a few nostalgic items from our earliest years in business.

On September 7, 1997 I went to the Ottawa U public library to come up with some names for the company Steve Pickard and I wanted to found the next morning, the goal was to choose the company name, register the dot-com, and then go incorporate it. I really felt that I lucked out when I discovered the word Pythian, which means about the Pythia and of course the Pythia was the Oracle of Delphi in ancient Greece (remember that we launched as an Oracle ecosystem services company, our other practices came afterwards with MySQL launching in 2002 and SQL Server launching in 2005).

I was also delighted that the Pythian Games were also hosted

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Oracle OpenWorld 2012 is just over a month away and yes we are organizing the Annual Oracle Bloggers Meetup — one of your top favorite events of the OpenWorld.

What: Oracle Bloggers Meetup 2012

When: Wed, 3-Oct-2012, 5:30pm

Where: Main Dining Room, Jillian’s Billiards @ Metreon, 101 Fourth Street, San Francisco, CA 94103 (

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This past week I attended OSCon, the annual conference for open source’s true believers. And there was a religous fervor in the air, particularly from the point of view of someone more accustomed to Oracle conferences.

And if open source is the religion, proprietary closed-source companies are the devil. That having been said, I was surprised how virtually all large companies were demonized. Even long-time defenders of open source like IBM were ignored at best. That didn’t prevent the from coming though, with Microsoft and HP in particular with high-profile sponsorships and PR offensives that didn’t seem to have much influence with the crowd.

The companies generating buzz were the small companies built around development of their own open source products. There are a surprising number of them out

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This last week was the first time we have this kind event here in Argentina, of course this is a great initiative and a good starting point for next events. My impressions: being the first time that these kind of conferences were done in Argentina I have to say it was great, small but great. [...]

Simple issue that Mark Callaghan mentioned on DDL operation. I found the back porting interesting, not always a possible option, and the out-coming results. Nothing to comment on top of what was already stated there, but mentioning it because interesting to read. http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10150783146150933 http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10150826999790933 Why a Killed query do not disappear, after it was killed? [...]

A calm week this time, I was really busy on daily work, but had some spare time that I have use to do simple implementation and tests. My work was related to Tablespace management in 5.6 and Table partition EXCHANGE, you can read the articles here . I have also start to dig a little bit [...]

Why this article? First of all because I had fun digging in the code. Then, I was reading a lot about the improvements we will have in MySQL 5.6, and of some already present in 5.5. Most of them are well cover by people for sure more expert then me, so I read and read, [...]

Following a brief list of what I have found more interesting during the last two weeks. Up to now, April has being a great month for MySQL. MySQL Conference  – Percona conference 2012 The Percona MySQL 2012 conference, has seen the MySQL community, interact as it was doing many years ago, re-creating the dynamic and creative [...]

The journey to the Hotel in Santa Clara took me something like 16 hours. It was long, arduous and at times despairing, but was it worth it? Absolutely! I made the epic journey with my Pythian (and former Nokia) colleague Andrew Moore, and once at the conference we met up with more members of our [...]

Day 1 is the fist official day of the Percona Live MySQL Conference; the day began with two mini-keynotes by Peter Zaitev and Baron Schwarz of Percona talking about the history of MySQL and how he got started in the open source movement respectively. Very nostalgic and I’m sure it brought a tear to a few people’s eyes.

Following the dynamic duo was full keynotes by followed by Mårten Mickos (Eucalyptus Systems) speaking on “Making LAMP a Cloud” and Brian Aker (HP) on “The New MySQL Cloud Ecosystem”. To be honest I found the full keynotes to be quite disappointing. For me the keynotes speeches should be about a topic that is visionary or notable in some way. What I got from the keynotes were:  MySQL is good, MySQL is growing, let me show you my product around MySQL, and buy/use my product. For me, they felt far more like

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Day 0 of the MySQL Conference is a day unlike any other day. It is, in fact, tutorial day. While regular days of the Percona Live MySQL Conference feature 50 minute sessions, usually split into 40 minute talk and a 5-10 minute question period, tutorials are 3 hour long sessions (with a generous 10 minute break in the middle for those that wish to go to the WC) that provide an in-depth dive into some aspect of MySQL. Due to the length of the tutorials, they are more in-depth and technical than individual sessions can provide, but at the same time we are limited to 2 tutorials slots per day instead of the 5 session slots per day. The tutorial schedule for the conference is located here and with so many good ones, it was hard to choose which one(s) to go to. For the morning session, I  [Read more...]

MySQL Cluster Performance Tuning ——————————————- In this session we will look at different tuning aspects of MySQL Cluster. As well as going through performance tuning basics in MySQL Cluster, we will look closely at the new parameters and status variables of MySQL Cluster 7.2 to determine issues with e.g disk data performance and query (join) [...]

Using and benchmarking Galera in different architectures ———————————————————- What I was interested most during the second day was again, synchronous replication and Replication solutions provide from Continuent. The first I attend in the day was the Galera one, done Henrik and Alexey. The presentation was going to talk about: “We will present results from benchmarking [...]

Here are the slides from my presentation “From Requirements to Partitioning and Sharding and Everything in Between”. A big thanks to all the attendees for their interest and questions. I got a lot of questions, so the audience was definitely very engaged!

MySQLConf2012-RajThukral.pptx

In about 4 hours, at 2PM PDT, I’ll be giving my talk “Security Around MySQL” at Ballroom A at the Percona Live MySQL Conference 2012. It’s a summary and guide of practical and easy-to-implement security tips around MySQL and the application. These tips were all gleamed from my years at start-ups (some which I worked at and some which I founded) and from experience at Pythian.

The details are here:  http://www.percona.com/live/mysql-conference-2012/sessions/security-around-mysql.

Mark Callaghan of Facebook: “What Comes Next for MySQL”

focus on Large, sharded deployments

Interesting numbers from their deployment (MySQL with Innodb):
60M QPS and 1.5B rows read/second in production

MySQL with InnoDB is “web scale”

scaled to 10x more data on the same servers by:
Start with MySQL 5.1, flashcache, find and fix stalls, use multi-threaded purge from Percona, ask the db-ops team to deploy a lot of changes, use OSC (Online Schema Change) to add many covering indexes, use Faker from Percona+Facebook to fix replication lag, Make InnoDB compression good for OLTP

“MySQL has made amazing progress”
InnoDB multi-core performance is impressive (yes, it’s finally overcome that early limitation!)
Replication is robust (global transaction IDs, multi-threaded,

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An exciting and busy day yesterday – lots of good talks, good conversations and good beer! Back at the sessions this morning and the first keynote of the day by Sam Ghods of Box: “MySQL: Still the Best Choice for Mission-Critical Data”

The usual story of a (file sharing) application that started out on one MySQL instance to store metadata and ran into scaling bottlenecks. Interestingly, NoSQL did not work out for them and they ended up sharding MySQL. “If you use a NoSQL store, but need any advanced featuers in your data store, you end up building them yourself. If you’re willing to partition your data yourself, you can use MySQL’s fancy features”

Now on to specific MySQL features that Box uses, not directly provided by NoSQL:

Inter-row Consistency (aka Unique Key) to ensure unique filenames in folders

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And lastly, from none other than The Brian Aker, a keynote on The New MySQL Cloud Ecosystem. He was formerly the Director of Architecture for MySQL and also the creator of Drizzle. He is currently a fellow at HP, leading their cloud architecture group.

A little history of MySQL of course. The drivers as seen my Brian over the years: Initially “Batteries Included” or embedded into a product, to “Enterprise” or feature-creep, market-parity, stored-procedures.. And of course the GPL license, which caused no end of confusion in the marketplace. Now on to DBAs (or the shortage of!), again something we can all relate to. Yes, Pythian is also always looking for good MySQL DBAS. Continuing on however, there are no more distribution/GPL concerns as MySQL is provided as a service in the cloud now, and software as a service

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The next keynote is from Marten Mickos, now with Eucalyptus systems, previously CEO of MySQL AB. He’s talking about making LAMP a Cloud. No surprises there, Eucalyptus is the leading open-source cloud computing platforms for on-premise use.

A brief history of MySQL, the first MySQL conference in 2003, Eucalyptus and how the two tie together. It is true that MySQL has been the most common database platform in the cloud. Certainly the other big databases are lagging when it comes to adoption and deployment in the cloud. One comment from Marten that resonates with us at Pythian and others in the MySQL services business – Oracle definitely needs to build out the partner ecosystem around MySQL.

Some good insights from Marten into how the database and software paradigm has evolved from scale-up to scale-out, from closed-source to open-source, from distributions to

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Here it is finally – the MySQL conference 2012 starts with the Keynote Sessions.

The first keynote speech is by Peter Zaitsev, founder of Percona and a very smart guy and also by Baron Schwartz (Percona), another very smart guy, the brains behind a number of toolkits for MySQL. They’re talking about the MySQL Evolution – what I alluded to in my first post regarding this conference – they ways in which MySQL has grown, evolved, scaled and continues to make new inroads into new applications and industries.

From Peter: “What is most important hasn’t changed – MySQL is still a great piece of technology and it is evolving very rapidly” (Love that quote!) Also “MySQL is also buzzword compatible: NoSQL, BigData”

From Baron: his own

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Wow what a lot has changed since the last MySQL conference I blogged about in 2007

MySQL has been acquired twice, once as MySQL by Sun and the second time around bundled with Sun when Oracle bought Sun. The conference is no longer organized by O’Reilly but by Percona. And the MySQL database itself has changed – We were talking about new features in MySQL 5.1, which wasn’t released yet, along with Falcon (where did it go?). 5.1 has long since been released as has 5.5 and we’re now talking about 5.6 instead of 6.0. There was no “Cloud” on the horizon, nor was there MariaDB, XtraDB, Drizzle, Schooner or any of the other offshoots of MySQL, all of which are creating a new buzz around the product.

Yet one thing remains constant – the vibrant community around

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This release is just a quick bug fix release of an older 1.1.1 version of the plug-in. It’s long overdue but I’ve managed to fix “” problem only couple weeks ago. I’ve distributed the new version to the folks who have reached out to me by email of via blog reporting the issue in the [...]