A panel on “Future Perfect: The Road Ahead for MySQL”

Brian Aker (HP), Paul Mikesell (Clustrix), Sundar Raghavan (Amazon), Slavik Markovich (McAffee), Ori Hernstadt (Akiban)

If there’s one common theme to this panel, and indeed, this whole conference, it is “We’re hiring!” It is amazing how much talent there is at the conference this year and yet it isn’t enough. Pythian is hiring as well of course: http://bit.ly/pythianjobs

Interesting differenciation between the mindset of Oracle from MySQL from Brian Aker: database as a service, which is something MySQL seems to be getting to. It comes with its own problems especially around trust levels which will lead to more thinking around data security (rather than just database security)

MySQL vs. NoSQL. Different tools for different jobs

Security is definitely a big topic these days other than performance.

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

A very well attended Pedro’s dinner – I didn’t count, but we had 9 tables of 8-10 people or so – dare I say almost a 100 people? Lots of beer, margaritas and good conversations! Here are a few pictures from the event

In case you live under a rock, the MySQL conference starts on Tuesday. There are 8 concurrent tracks of content. Aside from my own talks, here are the sessions I would most like to see.

On Tuesday:

• Tutorial: Innodb and XtraDB Architecture and Performance Optimization. Peter’s talks are always great, and this is a perennial favorite. If you have never been, you should go to this one. You will realize how little you really know about InnoDB/XtraDB, and how much it matters.

We’re running Birds of a Feather (BoF) sessions and lightning talks this year at the MySQL conference, similarly to previous years. You can help by submitting proposals ASAP. The deadline is Monday, and it is a hard deadline.

Submit a BoF Session • Submit a Lightning Talk

Why is this a big deal? Why the hard deadline? It turns out that this is one of the things I always underestimated. Planning for these is actually quite difficult and they are very expensive. That’s because we have to ensure that there is room for them to take place, doors are unlocked, and the lights are turned on. This really surprised me — I always thought it was

This year, I have the pleasure of returning to the MySQL Conference & Expo as a speaker. Percona have picked up the torch that O’Reilly had held as the conference organizers, and they’re putting together a 3-day conference this year. I am co-presenting a tutorial with Yves Trudeau from Percona.

Read more

Want a free copy of High Performance MySQL, Third Edition? If you register before the early-bird pricing expires for the MySQL Conference in April, and use the discount code PL-Book, you’ll get to take a free copy home from the conference!

And now, a status update: I’m currently proofing the QC2 (quality control #2) revision of the book; after this, the book goes to manufacturing. The PDF is now 820 pages, which is a lot of work to proofread. You can imagine how much more in-depth we’ve been able to go with so many more pages.

The

I’ll be speaking at FOSDEM 2012 conference at MySQL and Friends track (schedule is yet to appear) with two talks “How to offload MySQL server with Sphinx” and “Sphinx performance top secrets”. Additionally I’ll be co-presenting “Sphinx users stories” with SkySQL engineers and customers.

Looking forward to meet you at FOSDEM 2012!

The slides from last week’s talks I (co-)presented at Percona Live and Linuxcon Europe are now available from our web site.

• In my tutorial MySQL High Availability Sprint: Launch the Pacemaker, I gave a fast walk-through of Pacemaker high availability for MySQL. Tutorial presented at Percona Live UK 2011 in London, England.
• In Fencing and Maintaining Sanity in High Availability Clusters, Madison Kelly and I explored the importance of fencing in HA clusters, highlighted important considerations for fencing, and shared technical details and best practices. Talk presented at Linuxcon Europe 2011 in

All slides are done, all virtual images are completed and we’re ready to roll for tomorrow’s MySQL High Availability Sprint: Launch the Pacemaker tutorial at Percona Live UK 2011.

This is probably your very last chance to register for PLUK as there are only a handful of tickets left. You can still use my discount code, HaasPLUK11. See you tomorrow!

I’m speaking at Percona Live, LinuxCon Europe, and linux.conf.au. And I just co-founded a new company.

I have a few busy weeks behind me, and even busier weeks ahead. If you’ve been wondering why recently I haven’t been updating this space too frequently, here’s why:

Yours truly and fellow ex-Linbiters Martin Loschwitz and Andreas Kurz have recently founded hastexo, an independent professional services organization focused on open-source high availability and disaster recovery. We are already offering both on-site and remote

This year’s Surge conference was a great sophomore event to follow up last year’s inaugural conference. A lot of very smart people were there, and the hallway track was great.

I presented on three things: a lightning talk about causes of MySQL downtime; I chaired a panel on Big Data and the Cloud; and I showed how to derive scalability and performance metrics from TCP traffic. I’ve sent my slides to the Surge organizers, and I understand that they will be posting them as well as integrating them into the video of my session. In the meanwhile you can download my slides from Percona’s presentations page.

Further Reading:

• I’m speaking at

Two of my proposals for Percona Live London on October 24-25 have been approved! Yes, I really had to propose them and get them approved like everyone else, although as I’m sure you can imagine, I had a good chance at being accepted :-) Not all of my talks were accepted, though.

I’ll be presenting a half-day tutorial on how to get great results when troubleshooting MySQL problems, and a conference session on how to use TCP packet headers to measure and analyze a surprising variety of aspects of MySQL performance and

Following my departure from Linbit, I’m honored to be serving a number of speaking requests at conferences over the next few months.

The first I am pleased to announce is my commitment to speak at Percona Live in London this October. The conference venue is the America Square Conference Centre not too far from the iconic Tower of London. My 3-hour tutorial MySQL High Availability Sprint: Launch The Pacemaker! is scheduled for Monday, October 24th at 1pm.

In this tutorial,

I am writing this on my blog because I want to take the Percona hat off (partially) and wear my community hat a bit. My loyalty was to the MySQL community long before I was involved with Percona.

There are now three Percona Live events for which we have signed venue contracts and begun plans: London in October, Washington DC in January, and Santa Clara in April. I have insider knowledge of what’s going on with planning all three events, and I’m proud and happy that I have a community-member seat at the table.

The London event, which is October 24-25, will be a natural interpolation between the medium size of our very successful event earlier this year in New York, and the much larger Santa Clara event next

I’ll be presenting at Oracle Open World on the causes of downtime in MySQL, and how to prevent it. This is a research-based session that presents an easy-to-digest post-mortem of hundreds of emergency issues filed by Percona customers. The real causes and types of downtime surprised me quite a bit, and the preventions run counter to a lot of conventional wisdom. I’ll just give a preview by saying that you should consider it a top priority to monitor how full your disks are! On the other hand, despite the fact that every monitoring tool in existence shows the binary log cache hit rate, not a single emergency in Percona history has ever been attributed to that.

The agenda at OOW is mind-bogglingly huge (see Dave

With OSCON in Portland under way (where LINBIT has a presence, of course), we are making three new documents available in the popular Tech Guides section of our web site.

• MySQL High Availability on the Pacemaker Cluster Stack is the definitive guide to setting up MySQL with DRBD on Pacemaker. A simple, step-by-step how-to which will have your highly available MySQL database up in no time.
• The DRBD Quick Reference has the most important DRBD commands in a compact and handy

I’ve been accepted to present at the brand-new and very exciting Postgres Open 2011 about system scaling, TCP traffic, and mathematical modeling. I’m really looking forward to it — it will be my first PostgreSQL conference in a couple of years! See you there.

Related posts:

I’ll be speaking at Surge again this year. This time, unlike last year’s talk, I’m tackling a very concrete topic: extracting scalability and performance metrics from TCP network traffic. It turns out that most things that communicate over TCP can be analyzed very elegantly just by capturing arrival and departure timestamps of packets, nothing more. I’ll show examples where different views on the same data pull out completely different insights about the application, even though we have no information about the application itself (okay, I actually know that it’s a MySQL database, and a lot about the actual database and workload, but I don’t need that in order to do what I’ll show you). It’s an amazingly powerful technique that I