If you regularly manage enormous data sets, you've probably heard about Tumblr's exciting new toolkit called Jetpants, which automates common processes for MySQL data management, most notably in the area of rebalancing shards for more efficient scaling. In evaluating and using Jetpants in various environments, we identified some interesting installation and usage gotchas, and we've documented those here - let us know if you find other issues worth exploring.  

Jetpants Installation/Usage Gotchas for Ubuntu 12.04:

Jetpants has to-date only been tested on RHEL/CentOS distributions, though working with the author (Evan Elias of Tumblr, thank you much!) I was able to get it running on Ubuntu 12.04 and Mint Maya/13. There will be more work to do, since RHEL/CentOS report back a service status …

Next week I will be at Nagios World in St. Paul and then going directly to San Francisco for MySQL Connect and Oracle OpenWorld (I have ACE Director responsibilities for OOW), so this week was frantically finishing up a lot of projects before finalizing my talks. All but one of the MySQL 3rd quarter goals have been met (there are 2 Postgres goals that are still in progress, but our Postgres DBA is not going to conferences next week so there’s plenty of time for those.

And of course, there are the spring conferences to submit to. I have already submitted conference proposals to Confoo and RMOUG …

Next week I will be at Nagios World in St. Paul and then going directly to San Francisco for MySQL Connect and Oracle OpenWorld (I have ACE Director responsibilities for OOW), so this week was frantically finishing up a lot of projects before finalizing my talks. All but one of the MySQL 3rd quarter goals have been met (there are 2 Postgres goals that are still in progress, but our Postgres DBA is not going to conferences next week so there’s plenty of time for those.
And of course, there are the spring conferences to submit to. I have already submitted conference proposals to Confoo and RMOUG …

The fall conference season is starting.  I will be doing a number of talks including a keynote on "future proofing" MySQL through the use of data fabrics.  Data fabrics allow you to build durable, long-lasting systems that take advantage of MySQL's strengths today but also evolve to solve future problems using fast-changing cloud and big data technologies.  The talk brings together ideas that Ed Archibald (our CTO) and I have been working on for over two decades.  I'm looking forward to rolling them out to a larger crowd.

Here are the talks in calendar order.  The first two are at MySQL Connect 2012 in San Francisco on September 30th:

• …

Love Python? Dig MySQL? Want to meet Oracle’s MySQL Python Experts?

Come and join us at the MySQL Connect 2012 conference in San Fransisco next week, 29/30 September. My colleague Chuck and I are both giving 3 sessions in which we discuss MySQL Utilities and Connector/Python.

Overview of our session:

• Talk: Developing Python Applications with MySQL Utilities and MySQL Connector/Python
• Hands on Lab: MySQL Utilities
• BoF: …

This week we present the Sphinx Storage Engine. Ear Candy is a gotcha about setting variables in the configuration file, and At the Movies is a video about MariaDB.

Events
MySQL Connect will be held in San Francisco on Saturday September 29th and Sunday September 30th. The schedule is now online.

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Following on from my post about MySQL Cluster sessions at the forthcoming Connect conference, its now the turn of MySQL Replication - another technology at the heart of scaling and high availability for MySQL.

Unless you've only just returned from a 6-month alien abduction, you will know that MySQL 5.6 includes the largest set of replication enhancements ever packaged into a single new release:

- Global Transaction IDs + HA utilities for self-healing cluster..(yes both automatic failover and manual switchover available!)

- Crash-safe slaves and binlog

- Binlog Group Commit and Multi-Threaded Slaves for high performance

- …

Details about my two talks @ MySQL Connect and Oracle OpenWorld 2012. 

Yesterday, over at my personal blog, I blogged about the impact of the MySQL slow query log. Since we’re working on Percona Server 5.6, I did wonder if this was a good opportunity to re-examine how we could provide slow query log type functionality to our users.

The slow query log code inside the MySQL server does several things that aren’t good for concurrency on modern systems. For starters, it takes a mutex while both doing formatting of what to write and while doing the write(2) system call itself. This is, in fact, entirely unneccesary.

From the man page for the write system call:

If the file was open(2)ed with O_APPEND, the file offset is first set to the end of the file before writing. The adjustment of the file offset and the write operation are performed as an atomic step.

So we can …

Read the original article at Hiring is a numbers game

On a recent twitter chat (#hfchat) I posted some comments about hiring. Some folks were complaining that they had applied to various jobs, and not heard back.

I commented…

Apply for a job and don’t hear back, it’s nothing personal

In today’s market, there are hundreds of job applicants for every position. Sad to say, but that means things become a blur after a while. There’s less chance to sift each candidate and find out who they really are or what they really know. It’s more about keywords, and buzzwords if you must, to get your foot in the door.

But there is a flip side to this coin, which I think many job seekers forget …