Following our events earlier this year in Raleigh, Montevideo, Buenos Aires, Toronto and Portland, we bring Percona University to …

MySQL Connect is very quickly approaching and I will have some insights from prominent members of the MySQL Community about why you should join us September 21st-23rd in San Francisco. Mark Callaghan of Facebook is the first subject and his answers are short, sweet, and concise.

What are your speaking about at your session?
The reasons and process of upgrading to 5.6.

Who would benefit most from attending your session?
People considering 5.6

What other sessions would you recommend or are planning to attend?
All of the sessions on InnoDB internals

Why should ‘Joe Average’ DBA or Developer attend MySQL Connect?
Learn more, network with others in the community, let Oracle know what you need in MySQL 5.7

A big thanks to Mark for being the first …

Our bigger customers where we help to deploy Galera Cluster for MySQL set-ups have some commercial hardware (e.g. F5 or Cisco) for load balancing instead of software load balancers.

For those hardware load balancer it is not possible to see if a Galera node is available or not because the MySQL daemon is still running and responding on port 3306 but the service is not available nonetheless.
So the load balancer still serves the Galera node while he feeds for example a joiner node with a SST. This would lead to application errors which is unlovely.

One can try somehow to teach the load balancer to find out if a Galera Cluster node is really available or not. But this requires a more sophisticated load balancer, know-how how to teach the load …

With the General Availability of the standalone MySQL Utilities it now makes sense to use these to simplify (and optionally automate) your MySQL Replication and High Availability solutions. In light of that, 4 of our MySQL white papers have been updated to reflect the new opportunities:

MySQL Guide to High Availability Solutions. Data is the currency of today’s web, mobile, social, enterprise and cloud applications. Ensuring data is always available is a top priority for any organization – minutes of downtime will result in significant loss of …

Time zones are a tricky feature. You live in a given time zone, and most of the time you won’t think about that at all. You may live in a place where you are conscious of time zones, such as the United States, if your business spans across the country, where you know that New York is three hours ahead of San Francisco or Chicago and Dallas share the same time zone. Time Zone support in MySQL is a complicate business in itself. Once you have updated your time zone tables, you can set your time zone in an human readable format:

set global time_zone="America/Los_Angeles";

This is nice and well. It tells you which time zone your server is working with. However, things get a bit hairy when you need to do practical …

Percona Server is bundled with the PAM plugin which opens a plethora of ways to authenticate to MySQL such as restricting time when users can connect to MySQL, authenticate via a USB key, authenticate to an external authentication system such as LDAP and many, many more PAM compatible mechanisms.

If you want to use PAM authentication on the community version of MySQL, you may follow the instructions here to get it working on your system. If you want to test PAM authentication, the simplest way is to authenticate via /etc/shadow. The steps do so can be found in here or you can follow the steps below.

Here’s a primer for setting up …

The MySQL Connect conference is a great opportunity to engage with the MySQL community, as well as the engineers who work on the MySQL technologies at Oracle. The conference takes place on September 21-23 in San Francisco. There are 84 sessions in total, the full list being available here.

I will be presenting this year too. Sveta and I will be talking about how you can best …

It is hard to believe it is already closing in on a year since the last MySQL Connect, but it is true, it is time to start preparing again.

This year MySQL Connect will take place in the weekend of 21-23 September with the Monday being dedicated to tutorials. As last year MySQL Connect is part of Oracle OpenWorld and is hosted at Hilton, San Francisco Union Square.

I am fortunate enough this year to be taking part in three sessions:

• Meet the MySQL Community and Support Teams [BOF2480]
  Join MySQL community and support team members in this BOF to ask all your questions as well as provide feedback, …

There was some suggestion after my previous post (Who works on MariaDB and MySQL?) that I look at MariaDB 10.0 – so I have. My working was very simple, in a current MariaDB 10.0 BZR tree (somewhat beyond 10.0.3), I ran the following command:

bzr log -n0 -rtag:mariadb-10.0.0..|egrep '(author|committer): '| \
  sed -e 's/^\s*//; s/committer: //; s/author: //'| \
  sort -u|grep -iv oracle

MariaDB foundation/MontyProgram/SkySQL:

1. Alexander Barkov
2. Alexey Botchkov
3. Daniel Bartholomew
4. Elena Stepanova
5. Igor Babaev
6. Jani Tolonen
7. knielsen
8. Michael Widenius
9. sanja
10. Sergei Golubchik
11. Sergey Petrunya
12. Sergey Vojtovich
13. timour
14. Vladislav Vaintroub …

I recently got pointed towards https://github.com/shodanium/nanomysql/ which is a tiny (less than 400 lines of C++) MySQL client library which is GPL licensed.

If you need to link into non-GPL compatible code, there is the (slightly larger and full featured) libdrizzle library. But if you want something *tiny* and are okay with GPL, then nanomysql may be something to look at.