I recently posted about how we, MySQL Community Managers, are trying to reach out more to the MySQL User groups and the MySQL Community.
The room has been quiet to far but it is a new room. You can find us in #MySQL_Community & #MySQL_user_groups on freenode.
A few common issues have come out that I have heard before. We as a community can work to address these concerns.

• List of user groups
• Few volunteers
• Difficulty in getting good legit speakers
• Low attendance
• Location for meetings

Some of these concerns have been addressed by the community in the past. https://wikis.oracle.com/display/mysql/How+to+run+a+user+group …

I will be speaking at Confoo this Friday on The Care and Feeding of a MySQL Database and Explain. And the week after, I will be in Austin for the Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education conference presenting Teaching Database Concepts with Open Source Software on the 7th from 6:30 to 8:00 PM before heading off to 6th Street (Y’all welcome to join me!).

And thanks to all the folks who attended PHP UK for making Andres, Johannes and me so welcome last week.

…

We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of MariaDB 5.5.20-alpha. MariaDB 5.5.20 is the first Alpha release in the 5.5 series. We hope to follow it up soon with a beta 5.5 release.

MariaDB 5.5.20-alpha is a merge of MariaDB 5.3 and MySQL 5.5 with some limited additional bug fixes. This is the first 5.5-based release, and we are releasing it now, intentionally without any extra features (and with it missing some planned features) to get it into the hands of any who might want to test it. Extra features planned for MariaDB 5.5 will be pushed into future releases.

As with any alpha release, MariaDB 5.5.20-alpha should not be used on production systems.

The Release Notes page has some notes on the release. There is also a  …

Ensuring sufficient disk I/O to catch copyright violations at network speed. Evidenzia GmbH & Co. KG

Issues addressed:

• Storage growth, including maxed-out disk I/O utilization
• Performance issues and business impact due to slow selects
• Inability to revise data schema on the fly

The Company: Evidenzia GmbH & Co. KG is one of the leading partners of the software, movie and music industry when it comes to tracing copyright infringements and illegal file sharing activities in peer-to-peer networks. Evidenzia helps copyright owners in protecting their intellectual property. Their powerful technologies enable copyright …

This year, I have the pleasure of returning to the MySQL Conference & Expo as a speaker. Percona have picked up the torch that O'Reilly had held as the conference organizers, and they're putting together a 3-day conference this year. I am co-presenting a tutorial with Yves Trudeau from Percona.

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This year, I have the pleasure of returning to the MySQL Conference & Expo as a speaker. Percona have picked up the torch that O'Reilly had held as the conference organizers, and they're putting together a 3-day conference this year. I am co-presenting a tutorial with Yves Trudeau from Percona.

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read more

This year, I have the pleasure of returning to the MySQL Conference & Expo as a speaker. Percona have picked up the torch that O’Reilly had held as the conference organizers, and they’re putting together a 3-day conference this year. I am co-presenting a tutorial with Yves Trudeau from Percona.

Read more

In his comment for Vadim Tkachenko's post Baron Schwartz writes:

"...I speculate that when MySQL 5.6 is GA, the official MySQL from
Oracle will have a clear advantage over GA versions of MariaDB in
several common types of workloads. When will MariaDB based on MySQL
5.6 be released? I suppose that when MariaDB based on 5.5 is 
finished, we will have a rule of thumb that might be useful to
estimate the lag. I’d expect (but I could be wrong) that it will
take somewhat longer to port to 5.6, because unlike the 5.5 
codebase where Oracle, Percona, and Monty Program made a lot of
changes in somewhat disparate parts of the server, in MySQL 5.6
there will be a lot of changes that will potentially conflict —
in MySQL 5.6 there are extensive changes to the query optimizer
and the replication codebase, …

Slave prefetch is an increasingly popular technique for speeding up native MySQL replication, with several tools already published to enable it, such as mk-slave-prefetch and Replication Booster.  Tungsten Replicator is now joining the fray.   This article explains how our implementation works, how to install and tune it, and how well it performs compared to unaided MySQL native replication as well as Tungsten parallel replication.

Understanding Slave Prefetch

Slow reads from storage are the principle reason for lagging MySQL replication.   This seems paradoxical since at first glance the lag is caused by delayed updates.  The explanation is due to the way DBMS engines …

Read the original article at Top MySQL DBA interview questions (Part 1)

MySQL DBAs are in greater demand now than they’ve ever been. While some firms are losing the fight for talent, promising startups with a progressive bent are getting first dibs with the best applicants. Whatever the case, interviewing for a MySQL DBA is a skill in itself so I thought I’d share a guide of top MySQL DBA interview questions to help with your screening process.
It’s long and detailed with some background to give context so I will be publishing this in two parts.

The history of the DBA as a career

In the Oracle world of enterprise applications, the DBA has long been a strong career path. …