The Call for Papers for the fifth annual Percona Live Data Performance Conference and Expo (formerly MySQL Conference and Expo) taking place April 18-21, 2016, in Santa Clara, California, is now officially open!

Ask yourself… “Do I have…”

• Fresh ideas?
• Enlightening case studies?
• Insight on best practices?
• In-depth technical knowlege?

If the answer to any of these is “YES,” then you need to submit your proposal for a chance to speak at Percona Live 2016. Speaking is a great way to broaden not only the awareness of your company with an intelligent and engaged audience of software …

It’s been three months since we announced anything for Percona Cloud Tools, not because we’ve been idle but because we’ve been so busy the time flew by!  Here’s the TL;DR to pique your interest:

• EXPLAIN queries in real-time through the web app
• Query Analytics for Performance Schema
• Dashboards: customizable, shared groups of charts
• Install and upgrade the agent with 1 command line
• Unified UI: same time range, same host wherever you go

Percona Cloud Tools for MySQL is a hosted service providing access to query performance insights for all MySQL uses. After a brief setup, unlock new information about your database and how to improve your applications. There’s a lot more, but let’s just look at these five new features…

EXPLAIN queries in real-time through the web app

I am proud to announce Percona Cloud Tools, the next generation of tools for MySQL.  I have been developing tools for MySQL for 10 years.  For the last 5 years, I have been developing Percona Toolkit (formerly “Maatkit”).  Almost 1 year ago, we began developing Percona Cloud Tools (PCT), first in-house, then in private beta, and now in public beta.

Here is the TL;DR:

Percona Cloud Tools is a web service, hosted by Percona.  There is a single cloud tool (a web app) called ”Query Analytics”, based on pt-query-digest, so one could say it’s “continuous slow log analysis through the web, as a service”.  Of course, the web enables us to do more and make things easier. …

Baron recently wrote about sending the query to the data looking at distributed systems like Cassandra. I want to take a look at more simple systems like MySQL and see how we’re doing in this space.

It is obvious getting computations as closer to the data as possible is the most efficient as we will likely have less data to work with on the higher level in this case. Internally MySQL starts add optimizations which help in this regard, such as Index Condition Pushdown which allow storage engine to do most rudimentary data filtering improving efficiency.

The more important case though is the Application – Database interaction. Modern applications often have quite complicated logic which might not map to SQL very well. Framework and the practices developers follow can only add to this problem. As results Application may be issuing a …

One longstanding complaint I have heard for the past several years, and still hear today, is that Amazon’s Relational Database Service (RDS) does not allow the configuration flexibility as running MySQL in an ec2 instance. While true, this ignores the consistent work that Amazon has done to provide access to the most important configuration variables needed to tune a MySQL instance (after all, how relevant is it for a customer to set bind_address in an RDS instance).

Let’s take a look visually:

MySQL provides 523 options (35 of them NDB specific, so aren’t relevant to RDS), while RDS provides (via the web UI) …

I am actually quite excited about Tokutek’s release of TokuMX. I think it is going to change the landscape of database systems and it is finally something that made me looking into NoSQL.

Why is TokuMX interesting? A few reasons:

• It comes with transactions, and all that good stuff that transactions provide: a concurrent access to documents (no more global write-lock in MongoDB); crash recovery; atomicity
• Performance in IO-bound operations
• A good compression rate, which is a money-saver if you use SSD/Flash
• But it is also SSD/Flash life-time friendly, which is double money-saver

So having all these factors it is just a no-brainer if you have a …

We just released our first alpha of Percona XtraBackup 2.1 for MySQL and with it we included the ability to encrypt backups on the fly (full documentation here). This feature is different than simply piping the backup stream through the openssl or gpg binaries, which is what some people have used in the past. A big benefit of using the built-in encryption is that multiple CPU cores can be used for encryption (with the --encrypt-threads option). You can also combine compression and encryption, each using multiple CPU cores.

One advantage of …

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 year’s conference and will appear this year with a group of Facebook MySQL experts:

• Domas …

As part of Percona Remote DBA for MySQL service we recognize that reliable backups are one of the most important things we can bring to the table. In my experience handling emergencies, the single worst thing that can happen is finding out you don’t have backups available when some sort of data loss or catastrophic event occurs.

With our Remote DBA service we can take care of backups for you, what follows are some of the internals of our implementation.

What kind of outages can happen?

• Someone runs UPDATE or DELETE and forgets the where clause or filters weren’t quite right
• The application had a bug causing data to be removed or overwritten
• A table (or entire schema) was dropped …

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 major MySQL release.

In addition to Tomas, Oracle MySQL technologists will also lead three breakout …