In the MySQL QA teams in Oracle we have been using a tool called the Random Query Generator (or "RQG" for short) for some time now. The main RQG testing effort has been on new server development, including regression testing. The recent MySQL 5.6 GA is a result of a couple of years of hard work, including a lot of RQG testing and bugfixing as a result of that.

I can easily say that the RQG has helped making MySQL 5.6 a better release than it would otherwise be. It is of course not our only testing tool, but there are plenty of bugs this tool has uncovered that would likely not have been seen in our other testing. Such issues include:

• crashes and asserts
• memory management bugs (valgrind errors)
• wrong results

The main clue to the power of the RQG is its …

Percona XtraDB Cluster

Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.5.29-23.7.2 on February 13th, 2013. Binaries are available from downloads area or from our software repositories.

Bugs fixed:

• DML operations on temporary tables would try to append the key for provider library, which could cause a memory leak. Bug fixed for MyISAM temporary tables, InnoDB temporary tables still have this issue, probably caused by upstream bug …

I’ve finally gotten around to starting to write my presentations for PLMCE2013. So, in the spirit of procrastination, I went through all of the sessions and highlighted some of the ones that I want to attend! Tutorial: Percona XtraDB Cluster Percona Server 5.6 Crossing the Production Barrier: Development at Scale MySQL performance monitoring using Statsd [...]

Finalizing my series of MySQL 5.6 -vs- MySQL 5.5 benchmarks (best-to-best results and config settings (1), scalability (2), tuning details and yet more test results (3)), I've realized that it just needs a one point more - MariaDB results..

One of my friends called me to tell a story about an article in one of computer magazines saying that "If you're having performance issues with MySQL 5.5, you should try MariaDB 5.5 and you'll be surprised!"..

It waked up my curiosity. MariaDB-10 seems to be only in alpha stage for …

It’s time to unveil the winners of the [Plus] readers choice awards!
Thank you again for your votes, remember that the real winner was the community, again.

I asked you to vote for what you used in 2012 and you’ve voted with your heart.
Here are the final results, congrats to the lucky guys and teams :

The most useful blogs in 2012 :

1. MySQL Performance Blog
2. The MariaDB Blog
3. SkySQL Blog

Ok, the Percona team members provides the best technical blog about MySQL (and more), this year again. Of course, this blog is very useful and interesting, I recommend to read the comments too, they are often very informative.
There is a …

Some of the NoSQL vendors seemed to have stirred up a mild controversy with their reactions to the launch of NoSQL access to InnoDB in MySQL 5.6 and their suggestions that NoSQL access is only a part of the NoSQL story.

Mark Leith, software development senior manager at Oracle has described the criticism as laughable and Oracle’s director of MySQL product marketing, Mat Keep, accused the NoSQL vendors of “trying to stand on the shoulders of giants” (which is pretty ironic given we are talking about Oracle adding NoSQL capabilities to one of its databases).

In any case I don’t see what the fuss is all about.

Sure, Couchbase and DataStax laid it on a bit thick, but these are corporate blog posts – it goes with the territory.

Besides …

I’m pleased to announce that my first book, the InnoDB Quick Reference Guide, is now available from Packt Publishing and you can download it by clicking here. It covers the most common topics of InnoDB usage in the enterprise, including: general overview of its use and benefits, detailed explanation of seventeen static variables and seven dynamic variables, load testing methodology, maintenance and monitoring, as well as troubleshooting and useful analytics for the engine. The current version of MySQL ships with InnoDB as the default table engine, so whether you program your MySQL enabled applications with PHP, Python, Perl or otherwise, you’ll likely benefit from this concise but comprehensive reference guide for InnoDB databases.

Here are the chapter overviews …

Oracle has now launched MySQL-5.6.10-GA, so it is time to come up with some new benchmark results. The test candidates in this benchmark run are

• MySQL-5.5.29
• MySQL-5.6.10
• MariaDB-5.5.28a
• MariaDB-10.0.1

The 5.5 versions are in because I wanted to check for any regressions. In the past we have often seen performance regressions in newer versions which were caused by new features.

This time the benchmark was run on a different box. The main difference is that this box does not have SSD but a high performance RAID-5 with 512M of battery-backed cache. Besides that the machine has 16 cores out of which 12 were used for mysqld and the other 4 for sysbench.

The benchmark uses sysbench-0.5 OLTP with 8 tables and 10G worth of data. InnoDB buffer pool was 16G, InnoDB log group capacity 4G (the maximum for MySQL-5.5). The different disk system required different InnoDB …

I’m really looking forward to this year’s Percona Live MySQL Conference. This is always THE event of the year for me in the MySQL conference circuit. It’s also the first year I haven’t been a speaker! I’ve been a speaker since 2007 but this year things were too uncertain for me to submit a proposal in time.

As usual, the real highlight of the conference is seeing and talking to everyone. Technical sessions are also great, but honestly I can usually study up on technical things without going to a conference. However, nothing can replace the benefit of meeting all the dedicated MySQL community members in the hallways and at meals, and talking to MySQL-related businesses in the expo hall. Year after year, this conference has been what makes things happen: technical innovations, product launches, business initiatives, career changes, you name it — …

It’s not too soon to be thinking about what sessions you’ll be attending while at Percona Live: MySQL Conference & Expo 2013. SkySQL’s team of MySQL and MariaDB database experts will be headed to Santa Clara in full force as sponsors and speakers of this annual meeting for MySQL database users. As you plan out your week, be sure to check out some of SkySQL’s talks, including:

• Ivan Zoratti speaks about "Big Data & MySQL"
• Ralf Gebhardt speaks about "Creating MySQL Test-Environments using the SkySQL Cloud Data Suite"
• …