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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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. …

The new stable version of innotop is now released. Version 1.8.1 is a bug-fix-only release, with no new features. It’s available for immediate download.

Further Reading:

• Version 1.5.2 of the innotop MySQL monitor released
• Version 0.1.149 of innotop released
• Version 1.6.0 of the innotop monitor for MySQL released
• …

We’ve had quite a bit of feedback already, so many thanks to all of you who have shared your thoughts with us!

However, if you’ve not voted yet, please take a moment and let us know what you’d most like to see in MariaDB 5.6:

http://www.skysql.com/content/new-server-functionality-have-your-say

As always, thank you, and we look forward to hearing from you.

Traditionally the most benchmarks are focusing on throughput. We all get used to that, and in fact in our benchmarks, sysbench and tpcc-mysql, the final result is also represents the throughput (transactions per second in sysbench; NewOrder transactions Per Minute in tpcc-mysql). However, like Mark Callaghan mentioned in comments, response time is way more important metric to compare.

I want to pretend that we pioneered (not invented, but started to use widely) a benchmark methodology when we measure not the final throughput, but rather periodic probes (i.e. every 10 sec).
It allows us to draw “stability” graphs, like this one

where we can see not only a final result, but how the system behaves in dynamic.

What’s wrong with existing …

[Rails] Unicorn ignores SIGUSR2 completely?:

It doesn’t. See the link.

I guess that most folk who read this blog are IT people in one way or the other. I do not expect my mother to read it, or even my wife. This is, after all, mostly about rather geeky technical computer things. But what do I do, when I am at work? I have been asked this more times than I care to remember, and I think this goes for most of you. Your significant other asks, your mum, some realtive, a guy you meet on a train or in a bar.

So what do we do, really? 50 years ago, the kind of jobs we do didn't even exist, and now most young people today can't figure out what a world without computers would be like. A large organization with 10s of thousands of employees managing all those people and all their production completely without computers? Not even thinkable these days, but way into the 1960s, computers was not something for everyone or even for every corporation, and many didn't even know what to do with them, did they have one. …

Again, I have moved to a new hosting provider after my free-tier with Amazon EC2 expired.  As usual I was looking for a good VPS provider with a decent price, providing good support and in particular a provider supporting FreeBSD, my favorite OS for server (for desktop I still prefer GNU/Linux.)

This time I have carefully reviewed many options and have finally settled with RootBSD, one of the reputed VPS hosting providers if you are choosing FreeBSD as your server OS.  One of the prime reasons for choosing FreeBSD is its performance, stability and the FreeBSD ports system.

Although my …