We’re less than a week away from Percona MySQL University at Portland, Oregon next Monday, June 17. The latest in a series of FREE one-day educational events, we are pleased to feature 10 technical talks by members of Team Percona as well as local members of the MySQL Community:

• Vadim Tkachenko, Percona co-Founder and CTO, will talk about

MySQL can be deployed in several ways, and that means you can choose a tailor-made path that best meets your needs. With simple services or development systems, many people are using a single server with some backups configured, and then simply take the downtime when a restore is needed.

As the application evolves, additional requirements will appear like hot backups, online schema changes,

Selecting the most appropriate solution for a MySQL HA infrastructure is as much a business and philosophical decision as it is a technical one, but often the choice is made without adequately considering all three perspectives.  When too much attention is paid to one of these aspects at the cost of the others, the resulting system may be over-engineered, poorly-performing, and/or various other flavors of suboptimal.

On Wednesday, June 5, at 10 a.m. PDT (1700 UTC), I will be presenting a webinar entitled, Choosing a MySQL HA Solution, in

“Best Practices for MySQL Scalability.”

If you have not already done so, I encourage you to register for my “Best Practices for MySQL Scalability” Webinar which will take place on May 1st at 10 a.m. PST. This will be an overview presentation, led by me and providing a high-level look at the components of MySQL scalability: application architecture, MySQL version and configuration, choosing hardware and operating systems. For each area we’ll investigate the most important best practices. Talk to you on

The Percona Live MySQL Conference & Expo 2013 was April 22-25 in Santa Clara, California. This was Percona’s second year organizing the conference and we were very pleased with the event and the feedback (check the #perconalive hashtag for a sampling of the great comments such as this from Tom Krouper or this from John Goulah or this from Jeremy Tinley or this from SF MySQL Meetup).

The Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo begins next Monday and runs April 22-25, 2013. Attendees will see great keynotes from leaders in the industry including representatives from Oracle, Amazon Web Services, HP, Continuent, and Percona. They can also participate in thought provoking Birds of a Feather sessions on Tuesday night and the Wednesday night Community Networking Reception will be fun and entertaining with the presentation of the Community Awards and the Lightning Talks.

If you

If you are looking for a class that is designed to jump-start your knowledge on MySQL 5.6 features, a class that provides hands-on labs, and a class that shows various migration methods – look no further.

We have been hard at work building a new class to ensure you have the knowledge and skills needed to verify your applications, and plan for the migration to MySQL 5.6. The class is called Moving to MySQL 5.6 and is a 2-day workshop.

The Moving to MySQL 5.6 workshop is being offered

In preparing for this month’s Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo, I’ve been reminiscing about the annual MySQL User Conference’s history – the 9 times it previously took place in its various reincarnations – and there are a lot of good things, fun things to remember.

2003 was the year that marked the first MySQL user conference independently organized by MySQL AB. It was called the “MySQL Users Conference” and took place at the Double Tree

5.6 has redefined MySQL performance and usability. Some great talks at the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo will provide insight into the new features and benefits of this major release. The conference is April 22-25, 2013 at the Santa Clara Convention Center and Hyatt Santa Clara.

Monday evening features the conference Welcome Reception where attendees can relax over food and beverages in the exhibition area following the day’s tutorials. After the Welcome Reception, at 6:30 pm, Oracle is hosting a reception to celebrate MySQL 5.6 going GA which is open to the public (but space

We’re very pleased with the speaker lineup for the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo. We have outstanding MySQL experts speaking on a variety of topics during the breakout sessions and tutorials. And the keynote speakers are all top notch, MySQL technology and industry experts who will share their views of the ecosystem.

Beyond the speakers and sessions, the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo offers a unique opportunity to network with the largest gathering of MySQL community members at a single conference. The extra day added to this

On April 3 at 10 a.m. PST, I’ll be giving a webinar titled “5 Percona Toolkit Tools for MySQL That Could Save Your Day.” In this presentation you’ll learn how to perform typical but challenging MySQL database administration tasks.

My focus will be on the following tools:

• pt-query-digest, to select the queries you should try to improve to get optimal response times
• pt-archiver, to efficiently purge purge data from huge

I actually don’t remember exactly whether it was in 2006, 2007 or 2008 — but around that time the MySQL community had one of the greatest MySQL conferences put on by O’Reilly and MySQL. It was a good, stable, predictable time.

Shortly thereafter, the MySQL world saw acquisitions, forks, times of uncertainly, more acquisitions, more forks, rumors (“Oracle is going to kill MySQL and the whole Internet”) and just a lot of drama and politics.

And now, after all this time some 6 or 7 years later, it feels like a MySQL Renaissance. All of the major MySQL players are coming to the

Percona CEO Peter Zaitsev leads a track at Percona MySQL University in Raleigh, N.C. on Jan. 29, 2013.

Percona MySQL University, Toronto is taking place this Friday and I’m very excited about this event because it is a special opportunity to fit a phenomenal number of specific and focused MySQL technical talks all into one day, for free.

Over the course of the day we will cover some of the hottest topics in the MySQL space. There will be talks covering topics like MySQL 5.6, MySQL in the Cloud and High Availability for MySQL, as well as

Facebook is a major user of MySQL and has pushed the performance limits of the technology. Their MySQL experts have deep, hands on knowledge of the technology. I’m pleased to welcome Mark Callaghan, Software Engineer for Database Infrastructure at Facebook, back again this year to the Percona Live MySQL Conference & Expo to share his expertise. Mark was a keynote speaker at last

Catch the webinar: “Learn How MySQL 5.6 Makes Query Optimization Easier” for more tips on the 5.6 optimizer

While preparing the webinar I will deliver this Friday, I ran into a quite interesting (although not very impacting) optimizer issue: a “SELECT *” taking half the time to execute than the same “SELECT one_indexed_column” query in MySQL 5.6.10.

This turned into a really nice exercise for checking the performance and inner workings of one of the nicest features of the newer MySQL

I’m pleased to announce that Oracle is sending some of their top technical people to speak at the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo. The conference takes place April 22-25, 2013 at the Santa Clara Convention Center and Hyatt Santa Clara.

Tomas Ulin, VP, MySQL Engineering for Oracle, will present an invited keynote talk on “Driving MySQL Innovation” during the Tuesday morning opening keynotes. With the recent release of MySQL 5.6, conference attendees will hear about the latest developments of this

Percona Server for MySQL version 5.1.67-14.4

Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona Server for MySQL version 5.1.67-14.4 on March 8, 2013 (Downloads are available here and from the Percona Software Repositories). Based on MySQL 5.1.67, including all the bug fixes in it, Percona Server 5.1.67-14.4 is now the current stable release in the 5.1 series. All of Percona‘s

Percona Server for MySQL version 5.5.30-30.1

Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona Server for MySQL 5.5.30-30.1 on March 7, 2013 (Downloads are available here and from the Percona Software Repositories). Based on MySQL 5.5.30, including all the bug fixes in it, Percona Server 5.5.30-30.1 is now the current stable release in the 5.5 series. All of Percona‘s software

“MySQL 5.6: Advantages in a Nutshell.” March 6 at 10 a.m. PST with host Peter Zaitsev.

This Wednesday (March 6 at 10 a.m. PST) I’ll be presenting a webinar titled “MySQL 5.6: Advantages in a Nutshell.” In this presentation, I will provide a brief overview of the advantages MySQL 5.6 offers. My focus is a practical one – to identify the conditions in which one or another feature can be successfully used providing significant gain, explicitly or transparently. There has been a lot of pretty cool stuff done in

Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona Server for MySQL version 5.5.29-30.0 on February 26th, 2013 (Downloads are available here and from the Percona Software Repositories). Based on MySQL 5.5.29, including all the bug fixes in it, Percona Server 5.5.29-30.0 is now the current stable release in the 5.5 series. All of Percona‘s software is open-source and free, all the details of the release can be found in the 5.5.29-30.0 milestone at Launchpad.

New Features:

• Ported the

Analyzing SQL Queries with Percona Toolkit, Feb. 25-28, 9-11 a.m. PST

Next week I’m teaching an online Percona Training class, called Analyzing SQL Queries with Percona Toolkit.  This is a guided tour of best practices for pt-query-digest, the best tool for evaluating where your database response time is being spent.

This month we saw the GA release of MySQL 5.6, and I wanted to check if any improvement has been made to the slow query log in table format.  Users of some MySQL

Percona CEO Peter Zaitsev leads a track at the inaugural Percona MySQL University event in Raleigh, N.C. on Jan. 29, 2013.

Following our events in Raleigh, Montevideo, Buenos Aires, Percona MySQL University comes to Toronto on March 22nd.

This is going to our most dense event yet, absolutely packed with information. Even though we have just 1 track we have 12 talks and 11 speakers. We had unique opportunity this time because Percona’s Consulting, Support, RemoteDBA, Training team are having internal meeting at the start of the week so

We are very pleased to announce the addition of HP and Amazon Web Services as keynote speakers for the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo which is April 22-25 in Santa Clara, California. Amazon Web Services is sending Simone Brunozzi, Senior Technology Evangelist, who will speak on “Databases in the Cloud: Present and Future.” HP will be represented by Brian Aker, a Fellow at HP’s Cloud Division, and a returning keynote presenter from the 2012 conference. HP, the newest Diamond Plus conference sponsor, joins additional new

I’ve been woefully neglectful of my responsibilities to post regularly about Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo 2013 (PLCME 2013), but here’s some highlights of what I am planning to attend from the schedule.  Read to the very bottom for the chance to win a free full pass to the conference!

When picking talks to attend, I typically try to balance sessions that will fill in gaps in my knowledge (especially with topics that have come up repeatedly) with sessions on topics that I already specialize in to gain more depth.  Once I’m at a conference, I often will change my plans at the last minute, but here’s what I’d choose today:

The deadline is fast approaching to submit proposals for the Birds of a Feather Sessions (BOFs) and the Lightning Talks (presented during the Wednesday Evening Networking Reception) for the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo 2013. Applications for the DotOrg Pavilion close soon as well. The deadline is February 24th for all three opportunities so submit your proposals now!

On Friday, February 15, 2013 10:00am Pacific Standard Time, I will be delivering a webinar entitled “Building a highly scaleable distributed row, document or column store with MySQL and Shard-Query”

The first part of this webinar will focus on why distributed databases are needed, and on the techniques employed by Shard-Query to implement a distributed MySQL database. The focus will then proceed to the types of distributed (massively parallel processing) database applications which can be deployed with Shard-Query and the performance aspects of each.

The following types of

Percona CEO Peter Zaitsev leads a track at the inaugural Percona MySQL University event in Raleigh, N.C. on Jan. 29, 2013.

Thank you to everyone who attended Percona MySQL University in Raleigh, N.C. We had a great turnout and a lot of positive feedback!

What’s next for Percona MySQL University? Next week we’re going to hold events in Montevideo and Buenos Aires which are

Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona XtraDB Cluster on January 30th, 2013. Binaries are available from downloads area or from our software repositories.

Bugs fixed:

• In some cases when node is recovered variable threads_running would become huge. Bug fixed #1040108 (Teemu Ollakka).
• Variable wsrep_defaults_file would be set up to the value in the last configuration file read. Bug fixed by keeping the value found in the top configuration file. Bug fixed

Following our Percona MySQL University event in Raleigh,NC Percona MySQL University comes to South America! We’ll have a Full day FREE MySQL Technical Educational events in Montevideo on February 5th, 2013 and Buenos Aires on February 7th.

I’m very excited to bring these events to MySQL Community in Uruguay and Argentina. This is my first trip to South America and it looks like it is going to be a lot of fun!

With Percona MySQL University events, we focus on MySQL Education for broad group of users. We’ve specially prepared talks that will be interesting for people just

Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona Server 5.1.67-14.3 on January 23rd, 2013 (Downloads are available here and from the Percona Software Repositories).

Based on MySQL 5.1.67, including all the bug fixes in it, Percona Server 5.1.67-14.3 is now the current stable release in the 5.1 series. All of Percona‘s software is open-source and free, all the details of the release can be found in the 5.1.67-14.3 milestone at Launchpad.

Bugs Fixed:

• Fixed the upstream bug