Tokutek and Percona are giving away free tickets to the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo (worth $995 each), and you can win them! We’re also giving away copies of High Performance MySQL, 3rd Edition (worth $55 each).

This year’s event is the best ever, with a better lineup of talks and speakers than ever before.  It’s the one event you should not miss if you’re at all interested in MySQL.  We really want you to be there — and that’s why we’re joining with Percona to give away free tickets! It’s easy to enter:

• Follow our Twitter feed, and retweet us when we mention

Given all the focus and hype on Big Data, I was excited to have the chance at the recent O’Reilly Strata Show to sit down with Jeff Kelly, one of the top rated “Big Data” analysts, to give a MySQL perspective. Below is my interview with Jeff Kelly and David Floyer.

http://siliconangle.tv/video/cube-strata-conference-2012-lawrence-schwartz

In the segment, you’ll find a number of topics. These include indexing technology, NoSQL vs. MySQL, when to

We had the privilege this past week to be invited to be part of the 2012 O’Reilly Strata “Making Data Work” Conference. Some of our photos from the event are here. At the event, we were excited to have Tokutek described in front of the approximately 2,500 attendees during the keynote sessions.

Overall, the diversity of topics discussed at the conference was impressive, spanning databases, developer tools, data visualization techniques, customer stories, and business implications. The full agenda is

Ensuring sufficient disk I/O to catch copyright violations at network speed.

Evidenzia GmbH & Co. KG

Issues addressed:

• Storage growth, including maxed-out disk I/O utilization
• Performance issues and business impact due to slow selects
• Inability to revise data schema on the fly

The Company: Evidenzia GmbH & Co. KG is one of the leading partners of the software, movie and music industry when it comes to tracing copyright infringements

So there I was, gesticulating in front of the chalkboard, lecturing to 120 students. Topic: the beauty of advanced data structures. The door opens and the department chair walks up the aisle onto the stage and comes up to me. 242 eyes follow her progress through the room. She whispers to me that I must stop speaking in English. Officially, the course must be conducted entirely in Spanish.

Entirely in Spanish… I turn back to face the students. 120 students are waiting for me to speak. I realize that I don’t even know how to say simple constructions like “x plus y” let alone “advanced data structure” or “order log log amortized time complexity.”

Is this a newfangled anxiety dream? Can this replace the tried and true: I’m in front of the class but I forgot to put on my pants? Can this replace the classic: I’m

While it might not have been New England’s weekend on the Big Gridiron, it was certainly New England’s day for Big Data at the New England Database Summit on Friday at MIT.

The summit was well attended, with 350 registrants and keynotes from prominent MySQL users such as Mark Callaghan. The coverage was quite broad, with presentations running the gamut from grad students (complete with bodyguards and intimidating academic

Review of the O’Reilly Strata Making Data Work Conference

(reprinted from my guest blog for the Cloud Council of 7)

Monica Rogati of LinkedIn told a story of the early days at the firm, when the reporting system consisted of a single server under someone’s desk. One day, someone needed an Ethernet cable and unplugged the machine from the data outlet in the wall. LinkedIn’s data reporting, its life blood, instantly came to a