We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of MariaDB 5.5.21-beta. MariaDB 5.5.21 is the first Beta release in the 5.5 series and follows the initial MariaDB 5.5.20-alpha release. We hope to follow it up soon with Release Candiate and then Stable (GA) 5.5 releases.

MariaDB 5.5.21 beta is a merge of MariaDB 5.3 and MySQL 5.5 with some limited additional bug fixes. In this release we have added some extra notable features including an improved thread pool, an updated SphinxSE storage engine for fulltext search, and the ability to selectively skip replication of binlog events. Extra features planned for MariaDB 5.5 will be pushed into subsequent releases.

As with any beta release, MariaDB 5.5.21-beta should not be used on production systems.

The Release Notes page has some …

Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona Server 5.5.21-25.0 on March 20th, 2012. Downloads are available here and from the Percona Software Repositories.

Based on MySQL 5.5.21, including all the bug fixes in it, Percona Server 5.5.21-25.0 is now the current stable release in the 5.5 series. All of Percona‘s software is open-source and free, all the details of the release can be found in the 5.5.21-25.0 milestone at Launchpad.

Full release notes are available in the …

Best Practices #2: Stop Trading Performance for High Availability
Tuesday, March 20, 2012, 10 a.m. PT / 1 p.m. ET
Webinar Details
Organizations need both high performance and high availability to remain competitive in today's 24x7 online economy. Please join us in this business discussion to learn how new technologies are, for the first time, offering IT decision makers an alternative that delivers both high performance and high availability, at a lower cost than status-quo solutions.Register here
http://info.schoonerinfotech.com/MBPSSTP_REG.html?at=Live-Webinar&an=M-BPS-StopTradingPerformance

How to Get Lightning-Fast Performance with Membrain 4.0 and Fusion-io
Thursday, March 22nd, 11 a.m. PT / 2 p.m. …

If you follow what Percona is up to, you might have noticed that I’ve created a set of high-quality monitoring and graphing plugins for MySQL and related systems. Currently they support Nagios and Cacti. I’ll give a free webinar on March 28th discussing these, and more broadly, discussing how to monitor MySQL successfully to avoid common problems like spammy alerts about nonexistent problems.

Further Reading:

• Free webinar on preventing MySQL downtime
• Free webinar on MySQL performance this Thursday
• …

Oracle & MySQL are proud to be a sponsor of the International PHP Conference 2012

Early Bird registration ends April 3rd. The event will be held at the Maritim proArte Hotelin Berlin June 3 - 6 2012.

Now that the snow is melting and spring is in the air, the SkySQL Team is hitting the road and making the rounds of key industry events, trade shows, and meetups around the globe.  Come meet the team, pick-up a few tips and tricks for using the MySQL database, network with your peers, and learn more about SkySQL’s products and services.  Here are some the events we’ll be at this spring:

BIG Data, A New Horizon for Data Analysis
March 20 - 21, 2012
Cité Internationale Univeritaire de Paris, Paris, France

POSSCON 2012
March 28-29, 2012
Columbia Metropolitan Convention Center, Columbia, South Carolina

…

Tokutek and Percona are giving away free tickets to the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo (worth $995 each), and you can win them! We’re also giving away copies of High Performance MySQL, 3rd Edition (worth $55 each).

This year’s event is the best ever, with a better lineup of talks and speakers than ever before.  It’s the one event you should not miss if you’re at all interested in MySQL.  We really want you to be there — and that’s why we’re joining with Percona to give away free tickets! It’s easy to enter:

• Follow our Twitter feed, and retweet us when we mention this contest
• Tweet “My favorite #MySQL conference …

A while ago, I explained how range access in a multiple-part index works and why MySQL can't utilize key parts beyond the first occurrence of some often used comparison operators. Luckily, there is a great improvement underway in MySQL 5.6 that will remedy much of this limitation. Meet Index Condition Pushdown.

How does ICP work?

Index Condition Pushdown is a new way for MySQL to evaluate conditions. Instead of evaluating conditions on rows read from a table, ICP makes it possible to evaluate conditions in the index and thereby avoid looking at the table if the condition is false.

Let's assume that we have a multiple-part index covering columns (keypart_1, ..., keypart_n). Further assume that we have a condition with a comparison operator on keypart_1 that does not allow …

Alex Yurchenko finally posted results on a benchmark he has planned to do for a long time: Galera vs NDB cloud shootout.

Their blog requires registration to comment, so I'll post my comment here instead:

***

Sysbench can do the loadbalancing itself, so there is no need for external loadbalancer. Just add a comma separated list of master MySQL nodes to --mysql-host. This is similar to what the JDBC and PHP drivers can do too, and it is my favorite architecture. Why introduce extra layers of stuff that you don't need and that doesn't bring any additional value?

read more

If you follow what Percona is up to, you might have noticed that I’ve created a set of high-quality monitoring and graphing plugins for MySQL and related systems. Currently they support Nagios and Cacti. I’ll give a free webinar on March 28th discussing these, and more broadly, discussing how to monitor MySQL successfully to avoid common problems like spammy alerts about nonexistent problems. VividCortex is the startup I founded in 2012.