After switching from the Better Cacti Templates to the Percona Monitoring Plugins we suffered from the Query Response Time and the Query Time Histogram not graphing at all.

It took me a while to figure out why our new instance wasn’t graphing: the response time query was performing and the script was picking up its values. Also the rrd files were created but for some bizarre reason all values were set to “NaN”, in rrd/cacti terms: Not a Number. If you search on that subject you will come across a lot of (forum) postings stating you need to change your graph type to “GAUGE” or change the MIN/MAX values for your data templates. Strange as this

For the past many years, there’s been a conference in April, at the Santa Clara Convention Centre where the topic has been MySQL and the surrounding ecosystem. The first year I went, I gave a talk on the new features in MySQL Cluster 5.1 to a overflowing room of attendees. For me, it’s an event that’s mixed with speaking about something I’ve been working on and talking to other attendees about everything from how a particular part of the server works to where we can escape to for nearby good vegan food.

So, I thought I’d share some of the sessions that I’m really looking forward to. My selection is probably atypical, but may be interesting to others. I’m not going to list the

An annual tradition of the upcoming MySQL user conference is the awards ceremony. Last year we introduced the opportunity for everyone in the community to nominate candidates and this was a big success. Now is the time to start nominating deserving winners for the awards for 2012, in the 3 categories named below.

The winners will be selected by a community panel (see below) and winners will be announced on Wednesday, April 11th at the Santa Clara Convention Center, as part of the evening Community Reception.

How:

Please send in your suggestions for deserving winners
to: mysql.awards@gmail.com
no later than: 23:59 Sunday February 29th (Pacific time)

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Henrik has already posted it over on the Drizzle Blog, but I thought I’d give a shout out here too.

We’re holding a Drizzle Day right after the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo in April. So, since you’re all like me and don’t book your travel this far in advance, it’ll be easy to stay for the extra day and come and learn awesome things about Drizzle.

I’m also pretty glad that my employer, Percona is sponsoring the event.

Usually people do this around New Year, I will do it in February. Actually, I was inspired to do this after reviewing all the talks for this year's MySQL Conference - what a snapshot into the state of where we are! It made me realize we've made important progress in the past year, worth taking a moment to celebrate it. So here we go...

Diversification

In the past few years there was a lot of fear and doubt about MySQL due to Oracle taking over the ownership. But if you ask me, I was more worried for MySQL because of MySQL itself. I've often said that if MySQL had been a healthy open source project - like the other 3 components in the LAMP stack - then most of the NoSQL technologies we've seen come about would never have been started as their own projects, because it would have

The program for this year's MySQL conference is now published.

As regular readers will remember, I served on the program committee this year and was one of those who appealed for people to send in great proposals. I would now like to thank all of you that sent in proposals. On my quick count we had over 250 proposals, and if I look at my own ratings I'd say about 180 of them were really good, conference worthy talks (and this already excludes some pretty good talks). A related piece of trivia was that this might have been the first year ever that the deadline for the Call for Proposals wasn't extended, which possibly took some of you by surprise. We simply got so many good talks by

At the company I work for we are still running Percona Server 5.1 in production and are slowly heading towards a Percona Server 5.5 rollout. It did take a lot of preparation in the past few months (write a my.cnf conversion script for example) and a lot of testing. A couple of machines already have been upgraded this week to 5.5 to compare performance and stability. So far the machines proved to be stable enough to keep them on 5.5 and even better: we already see a couple of benefits! However, the title wouldn’t have been blues if everything would have been a breeze, right?

First problem we ran into was that our Cacti templates broke due to the changed InnoDB status output. So I headed towards the Cacti templates and looked in the issue tracker if the issue was already known.

Just wanted to say I'm so happy: http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2012/01/09/announcement-of-percona-x...

And also that this is a significant moment in the evolution of MySQL - things will never be the same again.

First of all, I wish you a happy new year.
Many things happened last year, it was really exciting to be involved in the MySQL ecosystem.
I hope this enthusiasm will be increased this year, up to you !

To start the year, I propose the MySQL[plus] Awards 2011
It will only take 5 minutes to fill out these polls.
Answer with your heart first and then with your experience with some of these tools or services.

Polls will be closed January 31, so, vote now !
For “other” answers, please,  let me a comment with details.

Don’t hesitate to submit proposal for tools or services in the comments.

…without even consulting them!

In my line of work the number of visitors grow fast near the end of the year, meaning also the number of simultaneous users will grow even greater. In our architecture that also means the number of inter-communication processes will cause the number of database connections to grow exponentially.

Something that wasn’t a problem at all during the past few months all of a sudden became a problem we were unable to put a finger on. All we found was that is sometimes takes a bit longer to make a database connection. We started timing it and 70% of the slow connections (longer than 1 second) turned out to be just around 3 seconds. In the end we always would have a connection, so what’s that to worry about?

Well, with a concurrency

More than vanilla MySQL

$ make_sandbox --export_binaries --add_prefix=ps \
   Percona-Server-5.5.11-rel20.2-114.Darwin.i386.tar.gz  \
   -- --sandbox_directory=msb_ps5_5_11
unpacking Percona-Server-5.5.11-rel20.2-114.Darwin.i386.tar.gz
[…]

A year ago I posted a blog on The state of MySQL forks: co-operating without co-operating. (Also Giuseppe wrote about the topic at that time, and Peter Zaitsev covers it in his conference keynotes.) So I've been wondering if it would be good to write an update on the topic now, and in that case what to write.

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Some of you may be aware that MySQL is increasingly using an Oracle-internal bug tracker. You can see these large bug numbers mentioned alongside smaller public bug numbers in recent MySQL release notes. If you’re particularly unlucky, you  just get a big Oracle-internal bug number. For a recently fixed bug, I dug further, posted up on the Percona blog: http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2011/11/20/bug12704861/

Possibly interesting reading for those of you who interested in InnoDB, MySQL, BLOBs and crash recovery.

There's now 2 weeks left of the Call for Papers for Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo (Santa Clara, CA). This weekend I've been finalizing my abstracts for submission and I trust many of you are doing the same. (If nothing else, do it for the free entrance! Or because you're passionate about MySQL, yeah, that's what I meant...)

This is the main annual MySQL event, so I thought it is worth the bandwidth to use these two weeks for some discussion and brainstorming. We are the MySQL community, it's up to us to make this a great conference now! This year I'm on the program committee, so I'm looking forward to reviewing many, many great proposals. At the same time, I'm interested to hear what you, dear readers - and hopefully future conference visitors - are interested in seeing at the conference? I'll

Part of my job at Percona is to perform customer audits.  I’ve had fun the last week getting up to speed on some of the great tools in the Percona Toolkit.  I’m sure people have talked about these before, but to be honest, I always found it hard to take the time to learn new tools, and at my previous job there were often a lot of tools in-house that made it easier to avoid learning something new.  The great thing about the Percona tools is that they aren’t environment dependent (as much as is possible), they typically only require Perl to run.

So, with that being said, I wanted to just go through a few of the tools I learned about this last week that I found useful.

pt-collect:

The collect script collects information.  A lot of information.  I ran it for 10 minutes on a customer’s

Here are the slides to my second talk at last week's Percona Live event in London:

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Here are the slides to my first talk at Percona Live UK 2011: Choosing a MySQL High Availability solution.1

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Many people have asked me what do I think was the best thing about Percona Live UK. I always answered: that it happened in the first place! This was the first time we had such a large and high-quality MySQL conference in Europe, and many well known bloggers and speakers that can't always travel to Santa Clara were present.

More importantly, many MySQL users who don't travel to Santa Clara could now see them speak and meet with them. I met at least 4 hard core MySQL DBA's from Helsinki that I've never met before. We had to travel to London to meet each other! (But if you are in Helsinki, we have our first MySQL user group tomorrow, this should fix things!)

When I walked into the conference venue, I introduced myself to a person that stood there

There are moments in history that become like signpost that everyone remembers the rest of their lives. Like where were you when you heard the news that JFK had been shot, or those 9/11 planes hit the WTC twin towers. If you work with MySQL and high-availability, then this week will be remembered as such. And if you're a European MySQL geek, you will remember that we were at the Percona Live UK conference when Galera clustering 1.0 was announced. Btw, the conference itself was also historical, at least for European MySQL users. I will have to write a separate blog post about the conference, because it was a great one, and I have to post slides of my 2 talks too. But this blog post is dedicated to the stable release of

Last week was a bumper week in London for MySQL users, DBAs & developers. We had the Oracle MySQL Developer Day and Percona Live London 2011. Both events were sold out, bringing in a good 300+ people to each event. From what I could tell the crowds were quite unique, so thats a good 600+ people interested in MySQL in London. The death and unpopularity of MySQL is greatly exaggerated.

At Oracle’s event, we naturally only had Oracle presenters. There was Simon Deighton (Sales Manager),

I was at Percona Live London 2011 these past two days. Very interesting conference. Good work Peter & team — you’ve managed to gather a good 300+ people at one venue in London. So full was the venue, that during today morning’s keynote I had to sit in the spillover room and miss out on Peter calling out my name :-) (no, Stewart and I were not drinking at 9am!)

Gave my session titled Why MariaDB? (slides). Pleasantly realized that there were many new faces. Better still, everyone has heard of MariaDB in the room. More interestingly is that a bunch of people are now also using MariaDB in production!

Had to rush

• Robert, at 10:15am: Teaching an Old Dog New Tricks: Tungsten Enterprise Clusters for

At Percona, we’re now using sphinx for our documentation. We’re also using Jenkins for our  continuous integration. We have compiler warnings from GCC being parsed by Jenkins using the built in filters, but there isn’t one for the sphinx warnings.

Luckily, in the configuration page for Jenkins, the Warnings plugin allows you to specify your own filters. I’ve added the following filter to process warnings from sphinx: