Start of the year and time for the first speaking tour. This time I will take my MySQL Indexing Best Practices presentation to Charlotte on January 14 and Atlanta on January 15.

I think this presentation is great for Meetup as it is both providing a lot of very good ready to use practical advice on picking MySQL indexes to people only starting to use MySQL, as well as going into the more advanced topics of MySQL index trickery so even advanced MySQL users will find something new to learn. Meetup format should also allow us more time to go into more details and more practical questions when useful. Bring your own indexing war stories if you’re joining us !

Another great thing about indexing topic is this is something both MySQL Developers and MySQL DBAs and Ops people need …

This webinar will examine the benefits of Read-Write splitting. To register, click here.

There are thousands of new online and mobile apps launching every day…but what happens when demand climbs for these apps and databases can’t keep up?  The long-term success of any app hangs on a company’s ability to provide uninterrupted access and availability – translation: Database performance [...] Read More

Now that we are in the New Year, it is time to settle back into work and make plans for 2013. As part of your professional development planning, consider Percona MySQL Training.

Percona will be holding the following MySQL Training classes in the first quarter:

• January
  • Live Virtual Training – DBA Training for MySQL: January 7-10, 2013
  • Chicago, Illinois, USA : January 14-17, 2013
  • London, UK: January 14-17, 2013
• February
  • Frankfurt, DE: February 4-7, 2013
  • San Francisco, CA, USA: February 4-7, 2013
• March
  • New York, NY, USA: March 11-14, 2013

To view these training events, and others, go to percona.com/training.

I should first start this blog post with the acronym IANAL (I am not a lawyer).  Also the views in this post are mine and not my employer's (a lawyer did ask me to say that part).

Questions on the MariaDB JDBC Driver have already been raised so I wanted to do something similar for the MariaDB C Connector.  The JDBC's issues are mostly ethical whereas my C Connector questions are mostly legal.

But first a little history...  MySQL 3.23.58 was the last version to include an LGPL licensed connector for MySQL, the connector went GPL (and of course commercial) after this version.  Nowadays the connector is GPL with a FLOSS exception, that exception allows you to compile with certain other licensed software.  The main reason for this is PHP version 4 switched from a dual-licensed under the …

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog. Here’s an excerpt: 4,329 films were submitted to the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. This blog had 21,000 views in 2012. If each view were a film, this blog would power 5 Film Festivals Click here to see the complete report.

I'll be speaking at Percona Live Conference and Expo in Santa Clara (April 22-25 2013) and this time I'll do a different talk from what I usually do. The plan here is to be low-level dirty practical, showing stuff using the Amazon AWS API, writing scripts using them and showing how to use them together with MySQL. I have said it before and I say it again, to get the most from your cloud, you have to understand and use the unique features of the cloud environment you use.

Can you create an elastic MySQL setup on Amazon? What about HA? How can you add slaves seamlessly? And automatically? I'll try to cover and show as much of this is possible, but the presentation is far from ready so I am happy to accept suggestions on specifics to cover here. See some more details on my talk …

The recent release of the MariaDB client libraries has prompted questions about their purpose as well as provenance.  Colin Charles posted that some of these would be answered in the very near future.  I have a couple of specific questions about the MariaDB JDBC driver, which I hope will be addressed at that time.  
1.) What is really in the MariaDB JDBC driver and how exactly does it differ from the drizzle JDBC driver?  What, if any, relation is there to Connector/J code?  There is a  …

For those starting to learn MySQL and want to install it on a Raspberry Pi: there is a little gotcha you should be aware of.

Disclaimer: Only run command if you know what it does. Always make sure you have backups of your important data.

First you need to put the official Raspbian image on your SD card and then boot the Raspberry Pi.

Then if you try to install mysql with "sudo apt-get install mysql-server-5.5" this will fail. The reason for this is that the filesystem on the SD card will become full. This can be seen by running the "df -h" command.

The SD card is probably 4GB. The filesystem will be around 1.9GB. This was done to make it fit on 2GB cards. To stretch the filesystem to complete 4GB you need to run "sudo raspi-config" and choose the "expand_rootfs" option. Then you need to reboot.

Now "df -h" should tell you that the filesystem has much more free space. …

Being the end of the quarter, there has been some planning going on this month about goals for Q1 2013 as well as meeting our goals for Q4 2012. Our biggest goal was to stop using MySQL 5.0, which we have successfully done. We only have one server left on MySQL 5.0, and that has a compatible MySQL 5.1 server waiting for a few developers to get back from their well-deserved vacations to migrate off. In December, we finished upgrading 2 servers to MySQL 5.1.

- Looked at the top 30 Bugzilla queries and started to give optimization tips for MySQL.
- Did our regular purge/defrag of TinderBox PushLog.
- Worked on integrating our datazilla code with chart.io features.
- Helped change the data model …

I’m not a wizard with infographics, but I can do a few pie charts. I copied the data to the right of the pie charts for those that want to see the numbers. Overall, there are almost 400 databases at Mozilla, in 11 different categories. Here is how each category fares in number of databases:

Here is how each category measures up with regards to database size – clearly, our crash-stats database (which is on Postgres, not MySQL) is the largest:

So here is another pie chart with the relative sizes of the MySQL databases:

I’m sure I’ve …