In about 4 hours at 2PM PDT, I’ll be giving my talk “Security Around MySQL” at Ballroom A at the Percona Live MySQL Conference 2012. It’s a summary and guide of practical and easy-to-implement security tips around MySQL and the application. These tips were all gleamed from my years at start-ups (some of which I worked on and some which I founded) and from my experience at Pythian.

The details are here:  http://www.percona.com/live/mysql-conference-2012/sessions/security-around-mysql.

We hope you all are having a productive and fun time at Percona Live! We at SkySQL sure are.

In fact, we have another announcement to make here at the show. We’re happy to share that our already excellent service and support will also include PalominoDB's operational excellence, 24x7 on-call support and access to PalominoDB’s skilled team of DBAs.

You can find more details on the partnership in the press release issued this morning.

Percona Live ends today, but stick around one more day and join us tomorrow for the SkySQL & MariaDB: Solutions Day for the MySQL Database. A day full of free keynotes, tutorials and …

For those wanting to become more familiar with Percona XtraDB Cluster or if you just one to test its capabilities, I have prepared an easy Vagrant setup ready to deploy.

It contains the puppet recipes to install and configure a cluster of 3 nodes and a load balancer (glb) running on the first node.

To be able to test it, these are the prerequisites you need to have on your system:

• VirtualBox
• Vagrant
• A CentOS Vagrant base box (you don’t need this one if you already have one)

Then you can find all the necessary files on my github repository: …

A panel on “Future Perfect: The Road Ahead for MySQL“, by Brian Aker (HP), Paul Mikesell (Clustrix), Sundar Raghavan (Amazon), Slavik Markovich (McAffee), and Ori Hernstadt (Akiban).

If there’s one common theme to this panel and  this whole conference, it’s: “We’re hiring!” It is amazing how much talent there is at the conference this year, and yet, it isn’t enough. Pythian is hiring as well of course: http://bit.ly/pythianjobs.

There was an interesting distinction between the mindset of Oracle and of MySQL made by Brian Aker: database as a service, which is something MySQL seems to be getting to. It comes with its own problems, especially around trust levels, which will lead to more thinking around data security (rather than just database security).

MySQL vs. NoSQL. Different Tools for Different Jobs …

Mark Callaghan of Facebook: “What Comes Next for MySQL”

• focus on large, sharded deployments
• interesting numbers from their deployment (MySQL with Innodb): 60M QPS and 1.5B rows read/second in production

MySQL with InnoDB is “web scale”

• scaled to 10x more data on the same servers:
  • Start with MySQL 5.1, flashcache, find and fix stalls, use multi-threaded purge from Percona, ask the db-ops team to deploy a lot of changes, use OSC (Online Schema Change) to add many covering indexes, use Faker from Percona+Facebook to fix replication lag, and make InnoDB compression good for OLTP.

“MySQL has made amazing progress”

• InnoDB multi-core performance is impressive. (Yes, it’s finally overcome that early limitation!)
• Replication is robust (global transaction IDs, multi-threaded, …

Yesterday was an exciting and busy day – lots of good talks, conversations, and beer! Let me take you back to the morning sessions and the first keynotes of the day, Sam Ghods of Box: “MySQL: Still the Best Choice for Mission-Critical Data”.

This is the usual story of a (file sharing) application that started out on one MySQL instance to store metadata and ran into scaling bottlenecks. Interestingly, NoSQL did not work out for them, and they ended up sharding MySQL. “If you use a NoSQL store, but need any advanced features in your data store, you end up building them yourself. If you’re willing to partition your data yourself, you can use MySQL’s fancy features.”

Now, onto specific MySQL features that Box uses, not directly provided by NoSQL:

• Inter-row Consistency (aka Unique Key) ensures unique filenames in folders;
• Transactions maintain integrity on file/folder renames where the whole tree …

Thursday, April 12Testing MySQL Creatively in a sandbox by Giuseppe Maxia, 2:00 pm - 2:50 pm in Ballroom CBoost Your Replication Throughput with Parallel Apply, Prefetch, and Batching by Stephane Giron, 2:00 pm - 2:50 pm in Ballroom GSee you at booth #307!

Guest Blogger: David Schleis

For the last dozen years, springtime has always meant one thing: cleaning up all the surprises exposed by the melting snow (you northern-tier dog-owners know what I’m talking about). But aside from that, this time of year always meant that it was crunch-time for writing the paper for my upcoming presentation at Kscope. I enjoy writing these papers, but I’d be lying if I said that it was all fun. There are pressures of the deadlines, making sure I get things right, that I don’t use “then” when I mean “than,” and generally that I read smarter than I actually am.

This year, however, is different in several ways; first of all, there was not much snow over the winter, so the back …

Have you ever spent a lot of time thinking about how to install and configure a Linux server for MySQL database? I will try to highlight all the critical steps and some of the decisions you may need to make.

Linux distribution.

Unless you have a really good experience in systems administration, choose a widely supported Linux distribution. The best choices usually are RedHat or its free cousin called CentOS. Compatible alternatives you could also consider are Scientific Linux and Oracle Linux. Make sure you will be installing a 64-bit version, unless you have a very good reason not to.

Storage.

If you have multiple disks available in the server, create a single array from all disks. Choose RAID level that offers better performance rather than more disk space, so either RAID 1 or RAID …

Key Notes

It was simply amazing for me as ex-MySQL AB to be at the conference today.
I was really emoted seeing so much people most of the ones I know, all together again.
The spirit was again the right one, with the will to say WE ARE HERE!
Impressive, and I am happy to say once more, “I was there”.
I am not going to comment the keynote speeches, but want to share the Baron message.
We are here to share, and help each other to make better, help each other to go beyond our current limit.
The spirit was the right one, the people there probably the most smart in the field, so why not.
I have only one world AMAZING.

Topic: Measuring Scalability and Performance With TCP

What if you had all the data you needed to measure system performance
and scalability at any tier, discover performance and stability
problems before they happen, and plan for capacity …