We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of MariaDB 5.5.23. This stable (GA) release incorporates MariaDB 5.3.6 and MySQL 5.5.23, some performance improvements, and bug fixes.

• MariaDB 5.5.23 Release Notes
• MariaDB 5.5.23 Changelog
• MariaDB 5.5.23 Downloads

Please see the What is MariaDB 5.5 page for an overview of MariaDB 5.5.

Sources, binaries, and package downloads are available from our …

Every old mansion has some old history, and the older it is, the scarier it gets ...

MySQL is no exception: there are some very old ghosts still lurking inside the server.

One of these ghosts is the 'host cache', which haunts the server main entrance halls, just right pass the TCP/IP front door.

How long has this ghost been there ? From the very beginning it seems, as is was first spotted on April 26, 2006 ... Yes, that was 6 years ago, back in the 4.1 old times.

This ghost has been haunting DBA's worst nightmares since then.

Public sightings include:
- Bug#22821 Adding "SHOW HOST_CACHE" patch from Jeremy Cole
- Bug#24906 No command to …

And lastly, from none other than The Brian Aker, a keynote on The New MySQL Cloud Ecosystem. He was formerly the Director of Architecture for MySQL and also the creator of Drizzle. He is currently a fellow at HP, leading their cloud architecture group.

He began with a little history on MySQL of course. The drivers as seen by Brian over the years: initially “Batteries Included” or embedded into a product, to “Enterprise” or feature-creep, market-parity, stored-procedures… And of course, the GPL license, which caused no end of confusion in the marketplace.

Now onto DBAs (or the lack thereof!), again something we can all relate to. Yes, Pythian is also always looking for good MySQL DBAS. Continuing on, however, there are no more distribution/GPL concerns as MySQL is provided as a service in the cloud now, and software as a service in the cloud does not need to …

The next keynote is from Marten Mickos, now with Eucalyptus systems, previously CEO of MySQL AB. He talked about making LAMP a Cloud. No surprises there: Eucalyptus is the leading open-source cloud computing platforms for on-premise use.

We were treated with a brief history of MySQL, the first MySQL conference in 2003, Eucalyptus, and how the two tie together. It is true that MySQL has been the most common database platform in the cloud. Certainly, the other big databases are lagging when it comes to adoption and deployment in the cloud. One comment from Marten that resonates with us at Pythian and others in the MySQL services business – Oracle definitely needs to build out the partner ecosystem around MySQL.

There were some good insights from Marten on how the database and software paradigm has evolved from scale-up to scale-out, from closed-source to open-source, and from distributions to “Stacks” (eg LAMP) to APIs and …

The second day of the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo is off to a great start! We’re excited here in Santa Clara to share the news that we’re teaming up with hastexo to further enhance expert high-availability knowledge for our professional services customers.

This means hastexo will assist in the development and improvement of Enterprise HA for MySQL® and MariaDB®, while customers of the product can tap into hastexo’s expertise and development of the Linux high availability stack for MariaDB and MySQL database support.

Teaming up with hastexo enables us to continue to deliver rock-solid high availability solutions for the MariaDB and MySQL databases. Just for you.

hastexo’s high availability expertise is accessible to SkySQL Enterprise HA customers today.

We will be onsite at the …

A key feature of our new TokuDB v6.0 release, which I have been blogging about this week, is compression. Compression is always on in TokuDB, and the compression we’ve achieved in the past has been quite good. See a previous post on the 18x compression achieved by TokuDB v5.0 on one benchmark. In our latest release, we’ve updated the way compression works and got 50% improvement on compression.

I decided to present numbers on the same set of data as the old post, so see that post for experimental details.

But first, what are the changes? TokuDB compresses large blocks of data — on the order of MB, rather than the 16KB that InnoDB uses — …

Here it is finally: The MySQL conference 2012 starts with the Keynote Sessions.

The first keynote speech was by Peter Zaitsev, founder of Percona and a very smart guy, and by Baron Schwartz (Percona), another very smart guy, the brain behind a number of toolkits for MySQL. They’re talking about the MySQL Evolution – what I alluded to in my first post regarding this conference – the ways in which MySQL has grown, evolved, scaled and continues to make new inroads into new applications and industries.

From Peter: “What is most important hasn’t changed – MySQL is still a great piece of technology and it is evolving very rapidly.” (Love that quote!) Also “MySQL is also buzzword compatible: NoSQL, BigData.”

From Baron: He talked about his own personal journey from closed-source, proprietory to open-source, and the …

Wednesday, April 11Building a Multi-master, Multi-region Database Infrastructure in Amazon EC2 by Edward Archibald, 11:00 am -11:50 am in Ballroom HBe a Data Management Hero with Good Backups! by Robert Hodges, 1:00 pm - 1:50 pm in Ballroom DOne to Many: The Story of Sharding at Box by Tamar Bercovici and Florian Jourda, 1:00 pm - 1:50 pm in Ballroom GBuild simple and complex replication clusters

With all of the new news coming out right now, it can be easy to miss or overlook some of the new features.

While there’s been a lot of talk about MySQL 5.6 Replication, I specifically wanted to mention the new ‘mysqlfailover’ and ‘mysqlrpladmin’ utilities.

These are two new MySQL replication utilities (results of the new Global Transaction Identifiers (GTIDs) in MySQL 5.6).

Let me quote the MySQL 5.6 Replication article for both of these utilities:

mysqlfailover

“Provides continuous monitoring of the replication topology, enabling failover to a slave in the event of an outage on the master.

The default behavior is to promote the most up-to-date slave, based on …

It is that time of the year, again: Percona Live is the name of this years MySQL conference in the Santa Clara Hyatt Regency.

Booking.com is there, and we are hiring, looking specifically for Admins and DBAs, but we also have Developer positions open.

Meet Nicolai and Sheila at the booth, if you have any questions.