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) …

Hey all!

Coming up this Wednesday, August 21st, 2013 at 12:00pm pacific (19:00 GMT) join in to talk about:

• Gerry from Tokutek to talk about B-Tree indexes in InnoDB and fractal indexes TokuDB!
• Schema Versioning
  • How do you manage schema versions in your development pipeline?
  • How are your schema changes deployed? Is it automated?
  • Some automated schema management tools:
    • South — http://south.aeracode.org/ — a DJango (python) friendly migration tool
    • Flyway — http://flywaydb.org/ — A database migration framework for java
    • Liquibase — …

Dear MySQL users,

MySQL Connector/Net 6.6.6, a new version of the all-managed .NET driver for MySQL has been released.  This is a maintenance release for 6.6.x.

This release is feature complete. It is recommended for use in production environments.

It is appropriate for use with MySQL server versions 5.0-5.6

It is now available in source and binary form from http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/net/#downloads and mirror sites (note that not all mirror sites may be up to date at this point-if you can't find this version on some mirror, please try again later or choose another download site.)

If you are in Washington DC area, don't miss Jeff Mace talk about using Continuent Tungsten to survive MySQL failures.

Join us September 12, 2013 for Percona University in Washington, DC. This full-day event will provide you with deep insights into MySQL as well as an opportunity to network with the local MySQL community. The practical knowledge you'll receive will help you be more successful in

Join 9500 others and follow Sean Hull on twitter @hullsean.

1. Stand up and be heard

Years ago I was sitting on an online forum chatting with an Oracle buddy of mine. This was circa 1998. We were working on an open source tool to interface with Oracle. There were all these libraries, for PHP & Perl, and a lot of developers starting to build tools. We hatched this hair brained idea to write a book about all of this, and pitched it to O’Reilly. They loved it and thus was born the book Oracle & Open Source in 2001.

Writing a book was, is and always will be a lot of work. It was a great learning experience too. Editors critique your writing, and this teaches you to speak to a broader audience, …

Raffi Krikorian, VP Platform Engineering at Twitter, blogged about Twitter's New Tweets per second record and how they achieved it:

"Recently, something remarkable happened on Twitter: On Saturday, August 3 in Japan, people watched an airing of Castle in the Sky, and at one moment they took to Twitter so much that we hit a one-second peak of 143,199 Tweets per second...To give you some context of how that compares to typical numbers, we normally take in more than 500 million Tweets a day which means about 5,700 Tweets a second, on average. This particular spike was around 25 times greater than our steady state."

Read the blog to …

We receive this question about the ibdata1 file in MySQL very often in Percona Support.

The panic starts when the monitoring server sends an alert about the storage of the MySQL server – saying that the disk is about to get filled.

After some research you realize that most of the disk space is used by the InnoDB’s shared tablespace ibdata1. You have innodb_file_per_table enabled, so the question is:

What is stored in ibdata1?

When you have innodb_file_per_table enabled, the tables are stored in their own tablespace but the shared tablespace is still used to store other InnoDB’s internal …

One thing you might have missed from the MariaDB 10.0.4 Alpha release announcement is that SPIDER is finally in-tree, inside MariaDB. I’ve been watching the SPIDER engine for quite some years and fondly remember the time when Kentoku Shiba dressed up as spiderman at a MySQL Conference.

There are many factors that plays to an engines success. Distribution is one of them. Having a company backing it with services is another, so it is with great pleasure that I also show you Spiral Arms Ltd by Kentoku and Goto.

Overall, a good time to celebrate and I’m very happy for Kentoku and Goto. Now to promote its use. …

Hey all!

Coming up this Wednesday, August 21st, 2013 at 12:00pm pacific (19:00 GMT) join in to talk about:

• Gerry from Tokutek to talk about B-Tree indexes in InnoDB and fractal indexes TokuDB!
• Schema Versioning
  • How do you manage schema versions in your development pipeline?
  • How are your schema changes deployed? Is it automated?
  • Some automated schema management tools:
    • South -- http://south.aeracode.org/ -- a DJango (python) friendly migration tool
    • Flyway -- http://flywaydb.org/ -- A database migration framework for java
    • Liquibase -- …

MySQL is the number one IT skill demanded for Linux related jobs and continues to grow in importance according to the Linux Careers IT Skills Watch update 2013. So boost your career with the authentic MySQL Curriculum.

During the top selling course, the MySQL for Database Administrator, you will learn to install MySQL products, partition data, check and repair tables, perform backups and configure replication, create secured users and enable SSL security, and much more.

You can take this instructor-led course as a:

• Live-virtual event: Take this course from your own …