If you missed Percona Live MySQL Conference in NYC, download these Continuent Tungsten talks!

FUTURE-PROOFING MYSQL FOR THE WORLD-WIDE DATA REVOLUTION by Robert Hodges SOLVING LARGE-SCALE DATABASE ADMINISTRATION WITH CONTINUENT TUNGSTEN by Robert Hodges and Neil Armitage CONSOLIDATE YOUR SHARDED DATABASE INDEXES IN REAL-TIME by Jeff Mace

We are sponsoring the upcoming Percona Live events in

Mark Leith writes that it’s time to say goodbye to SHOW PROCESSLIST in MySQL 5.6, and use the Performance Schema replacement for it instead, because the older tools cause some blocking, and the Performance Schema replacement is completely non-blocking.

On the face of it that’s a good thing, but I wonder whether we’ll want to keep some blocking functionality around anyway. Inspecting systems that are doing concurrent work can be hard unless you can see a variety of views on them. One such is looking at the state of all the concurrent work at an instant in time. This is sometimes indispensable for troubleshooting: you will see causes and effects you’ll never see in counters and metrics, no matter how many you capture or how sophisticated the analysis.

I haven’t seen MySQL 5.6 in production usage …

Last week, Baron wrote a great post entitled “What’s the benefit of the cloud?” The post was short and made the point that “the benefit of the cloud” is “less ops, more dev.” But Baron is coming from the point of a developer, and from the point of an ops person, there is not necessarily “less ops”.

Some commenters made points along the lines of, “you can just rent rack space in some datacenter for that.” And I agree. There are some ops benefits that Amazon adds, such as easier monitoring and backups, but for the most part, there is not *less* work from an operations standpoint when you are in a cloud environment – my time doing remote DBA work at Pythian and PalominoDB certainly taught me that!

There are still …

Last week, Baron wrote a great post entitled “What’s the benefit of the cloud?” The post was short and made the point that “the benefit of the cloud” is “less ops, more dev.” But Baron is coming from the point of a developer, and from the point of an ops person, there is not necessarily “less ops”.
Some commenters made points along the lines of, “you can just rent rack space in some datacenter for that.” And I agree. There are some ops benefits that Amazon adds, such as easier monitoring and backups, but for the most part, there is not *less* work from an operations standpoint when you are in a cloud environment – my time doing remote DBA work at Pythian and PalominoDB certainly taught me that!
There are still …

MySQL Troubleshooting – What To Do When Queries Don’t Work is a recent publication that you will want to have on your bookshelf. A college professor once lectured to one of my classes that it was easy to teach programming but nearly impossible to teach debugging as there were so many factors involved. The quote the stuck with me was, “Is is very heard to think as dumb as the machine.”

MySQL can prove to be a difficult software beast to keep happy. This book is a guide on everything from simple syntax errors to trouble shooting system environment issues. It is clearly written, concise, and has several tricks & Tips that are invaluable. This is not a cookbook on solving MySQL problems but a guide on how to investigate the various reasons for hanging queries, poor performance, on just puzzling hangs.

So who needs this book? Intermediate to advanced level DBAs or those wishing to to become one.

Sveta Smirnova …

Read the original article at Why do people leave consulting?

As a long time freelancer, it’s a question that’s intrigued me for some time. I do have some theories… First, definitions… I’m not talking about working for a large consulting firm. Although this role may be called “consultant”, my meaning is consultant as sole proprietor, entrepreneur, gun for hire or lone wolf. 1. Make more [...]

For more articles like these go to Sean Hull's Scalable Startups

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Call for Papers for the annual Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo in Santa Clara, are set to close at the end of the day tomorrow Oct. 12th. Please consider submitting one or more speaking proposals. If you are selected to speak you will receive a free full conference pass valued at over $1,500.

In addition, Super Saver Registration for this conference and Advanced Rate registration for our London conference end tomorrow as well. Sign up now before the price goes up!

Submit your papers and or register here: http://www.percona.com/live/mysql-conference-2013/

or here for London: http://www.percona.com/live/london-2012/

Solid State Drive (SSD) have made it big and have made their way not only in desktop computing but also in mission-critical servers. SSDs have proved to be a break-through in IO performance and leave HDD far far behind in terms of Random IO performance. Random IO is what most of the database administrators would be concerned about as that is 90% of the IO pattern visible on database servers like MySQL. I have found Intel 520-series and Intel 910-series to be quite popular and they do give very good numbers in terms of Random IOPS. However, its not just performance that you should be concerned about, failure predictions and health gauges are also very important, as loss of data is a big NO-NO. There is a great deal of misconception about the endurance level of SSD, as its mostly compared to rotating disks even when measuring endurance levels, however, there is a big difference in how both SSD and HDD work, and that has a direct impact on the endurance …

Many of us know the joys of the "Screen" command. I did notice that this topic became a point of many questions at the recent Ohio LinuxFest, so I thought I could touch more on it here.

Being able to detach and reattach to a shell is a wonderful thing.  It is very useful when executing long query transactions like MySQL data exports or even running backups at times. It is also very useful to be able to change computers or locations and keep the same working shell environment. I often used Screen when I started a shell script that executed a full compressed backup, scp the files to a remote slave, and then would start to uncompress the backup onto the new slave. The entire process for this was around 24hrs easily so being able to reattached and monitor the progress was very helpful.

Being able to have a visual display that is quick and clear as to what host your …

The core technology behind Tokutek is based on the academic research by our founders: Michael Bender, Bradley Kuszmaul and Martin Farach-Colton.  They are all still in academia, in addition to their work at Tokutek.

Back in March, the White House kicked off a new Initiative for Big Data.  Last week, the National Science Foundation announced the first interagency grants for this.  Eight awards were given, and our own Michael Bender and Martin Farach-Colton, along with Robert Johnson of Stony Brook University, received one of them.

Through their academic work, they hope to extend our …