Narrowing down which queries to optimize is a step in database administration that is often skipped - however it shouldn't be!  

Why is selecting the right queries to optimize so important? There are several reasons. 

Penny-Wise, Pound-Foolish  Look at the forest, not just the trees, and optimize globally, not locally. If you’re optimizing a query that never causes a user-visible problem, doesn’t impact other queries, and doesn’t significantly load servers, you might be “optimizing” things that don’t matter, spending more money than you save. Your time has value, too! Keep in mind, too, that optimizing a query that generates only 1% of the database’s overall load will not be a significant benefit to the bottom line.   Whack-A-Mole Queries It’s very common to  find a slow query in a log file, try re-executing it and  then find that it is fast. …

We’ve posted the Percona Live 2018 keynote addresses for the seventh annual Percona Live Open Source Database Conference 2018, taking place April 23-25, 2018 at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. 

This year’s keynotes explore topics ranging from how cloud and open source database adoption accelerates business growth, to leading-edge emerging technologies, to the importance of MySQL 8.0, to the growing popularity of PostgreSQL.

We’re excited by the great lineup of speakers, including our friends at Alibaba Cloud, Grafana, Microsoft, Oracle, Upwork and VividCortex, the innovative leaders on the Cool Technologies panel, and Brendan Gregg …

We’ve been searching for a great venue for Percona Live Europe 2018, and I am thrilled to announce we’ll be hosting it in Frankfurt, Germany! Please block November 5-7, 2018 on your calendar now and plan to join us at the Radisson Blu Frankfurt for the premier open source database conference.

We’re in the final days of organizing for the Percona Live 2018 in Santa Clara. You can still purchase tickets for an amazing lineup of keynote speakers, tutorials and sessions. We have ten tracks, including MySQL, MongoDB, Cloud, PostgreSQL, Containers and Automation, Monitoring and Ops, and Database Security. Major areas of focus at the conference will include:

…

Welcome to another interview blog for the rapidly-approaching Percona Live 2018. Each post in this series highlights a Percona Live 2018 featured talk at the conference and gives a short preview of what attendees can expect to learn from the presenter.

This blog post highlights Jenni Snyder, Engineering Manager – Operations at Yelp. Her tutorial talk is titled The Accidental DBA. Open source relational databases like MySQL and PostgreSQL power some of the world’s largest websites. They can be used out of the box with few adjustments, and rarely require a dedicated Database …

Join Percona Chief Evangelist Colin Charles as he covers happenings, gives pointers and provides musings on the open source database community.

Writing to you on the ground from FOSSASIA 2018, where I gave a track introduction yesterday since we have a pretty awesome database track most Saturday, and generally, all MySQL focused on Sunday. There’s even a list of talks by Oracle MySQL’ers (yes, there’s more than just Oracle folk, but for that, you got to get the schedule).

The Percona Live Community Dinner happens again this year during Percona Live 2018, at Pedro’s on 24 April 2018. It starts at 7 pm, and I highly recommend you purchase the …

Join Percona Chief Evangelist Colin Charles as he covers happenings, gives pointers and provides musings on the open source database community.

SCALE16x is over. Percona had a large showing — both Peter Zaitsev & myself had talks, and the booth in the expo hall saw Rick Golba, Marc Sherwood, and Dave Avery also pop by. The lead scanner suggests we had several hundred conversations — read Dave Avery’s summary. My talk went well, though during Q&A the number of questions I got about MariaDB Server was quite interesting (considering it wasn’t part of my talk!). It is clear people are concerned about compatibility (because I spent close to 45 minutes after my talk answering Q&A outside too).

I got to catch up with …

I’m pleased to announce that VividCortex has just released a number of new features since our last product update. If you have any questions regarding any of the updates below, contact us!

Short URLs

You can now share links with your coworkers and collaborate in VividCortex using URLs short enough to be copied and pasted into emails and chat apps, letting you get work done faster with less hassle. Just click the Link icon in the top right of the screen and copy the URL:

When anyone with appropriate permissions clicks the link, they’ll be taken directly to the URL you were looking at when you grabbed the link. Click “Freeze Time Range” to let your coworkers see the time frame you were viewing, no matter when they click the link. For more details, take a look at our …

I’m pleased to announce that VividCortex now offers 99th percentile metrics to help understand latency outliers in a query workload. These metrics provide visibility beyond the average latency, help identify the worst outliers, and improve focus on the customer experience. They are offered for all of the databases we currently support when using On-Host monitoring.

What You'll See

Latency percentile metrics are one of our most popular feature requests, so we know this will make a lot of you very happy! We actually started collecting these metrics some time ago; you’ll have p99 latency metrics for the last couple of months if you look back at your historical metrics. These metrics are captured globally for an environment, per-query, per-database, per-user, per-verb, per-caller and per-custom-query-tag.

Why Did We Choose to Implement This? 

It is extremely useful for a lot of reasons. Averages can be …

Buying software solutions for your company is a skill just like any other business practice. To be effective at purchasing it is necessary to have a clear understanding of what you require and a plan on how to evaluate potential vendors. When time is also a factor a working knowledge of the internal buying processes and expectations of your employer are also important.

The wide variety of similar sounding products with hard to distinguish feature differentiators can be daunting. In order to get the right software at a competitive price within the desired timeframe there are 4 important things to consider.

Here’s the short list:

• Define requirements by focusing on needs instead of features
• Prepare your budget, know your buying process
• Check provider quality and support
• Make the most of your trial period

And here’s the longer one: …

Buying software solutions for your company is a skill just like any other business practice. To be effective at purchasing it is necessary to have a clear understanding of what you require and a plan on how to evaluate potential vendors. When time is also a factor a working knowledge of the internal buying processes and expectations of your employer are also important.

The wide variety of similar sounding products with hard to distinguish feature differentiators can be daunting. In order to get the right software at a competitive price within the desired timeframe there are 4 important things to consider.

Here’s the short list:

• Define requirements by focusing on needs instead of features
• Prepare your budget, know your buying process
• Check provider quality and support
• Make the most of your trial period

And here’s the longer one: …