This week I have been at the IOUC User Group Leader's Conference, and I have met a ton of great folks who are user group leaders and made some great contacts for future speaking engagement. Follow this space to learn about calls for papers for international conferences! First up is the call for papers for the OUG Harmony conference.

The OUG is the Oracle Users Group for Finland and Latvia, in conjunction with Estonia and Russia. The Finland conference is specifically looking for MySQL content, and is May 30-31st in Hämeenlinna, Finland. Talks can be in Finnish or English, and they're looking for good basic MySQL information.

I spoke today at the conference about the MySQL community - who it is, how it's grown, and what the challenges are as we try …

Day three of the User Group Leadership Summit is here and MySQL has continued to have a valid presence from the community as well as the Oracle Team.

George Trujillo introduced MySQL for the Oracle DBA to a very attentive audience.
Ronald Bradford gave a great presentation on why people should use MySQL.
Sheeri Cabral talked on the MySQL Community and user groups. Members of Oracle user groups showed great interest in the MySQL User groups.


So how can I summarize the summit in one line:
Oracle DBA user group members are interested in MySQL and the community!

Searching for the Holly GrailFor months I have been writing and rewriting an blog post called “The Full Monty”. It’s a kind of how to build complete production system from scratch. I’m still not done. Maybe I’m fullish thinking I can build a one type fits all database server. But that’s not the problem. I’ve found myself chasing the Holly Grail of HA and replication.I’ve build many virtual clusters with all the HA / replication package I could find. I’ve tried DRBD, Heartbeat,  Multi Master Management (MMM), Tungsten, …

I am pleased to announce the schedule for Percona Live: MySQL Conference And Expo 2012 is now published. This is truly great selection of talks with something for MySQL Developers, DBAs, Managers, people just starting to use MySQL as well as looking for advanced topics. We have talks about running MySQL on extremely large scale in a Web as well as running MySQL In the Enterprise Environments. Some speakers have spent over decade pushing MySQL to its limits, others have in depth experience working on MySQL Code.

We have many talks which are covering Oracle MySQL, and forks such as MariaDB, Drizzle and …

MySQL, like a lot of other software, has many knobs you can tweak. Most of these knobs may affect behaviour, but more importantly most affect the memory usage of the server, so getting these settings right is very important.

Most of MySQL’s memory is really used just as a cache, in one form or another, information that otherwise is on disk. So ensuring you have as large a cache as possible is important. However, making these memory sizes too large will trigger the server to start swapping and possibly can cause it to crash or cause the kernel to kill the process when it runs out of memory.  So that’s something we want to avoid.

Certain settings affect memory allocation on a per connection/thread basis, being bounded by thread_cache_size and max_connections.  If you configure for the worst behaviour (max_connections) you may end up not actually using all the memory you have available, memory which normally could be …

Take advantage of the events.oracle.com site and get a RSS feed of local events on your area.

Currently :

Problem: Find out if an entire string is numeric.  (Just like the is_numeric function in php.)

Problem, Part II: Most online resources show how you can find out if part of your string is numeric.

Solution: SELECT str FROM tbl   WHERE str REGEXP('(^[0-9]+$)');Give it a whirl!

For those who would like to view some test results, here goes: mysql> SELECT str FROM tbl; +-----+ | str | +-----+ |

On the 25th of January at 10 am PST, I will present a webinar on preventing MySQL emergencies titled “Preventing Downtime in Production MySQL Servers”. The material I will present is based on in-depth research done by Percona across many production servers.  We analyzed more than 150 emergency cases and categorized our findings to help you learn ways to avoid production downtimes. Join us to learn more about why emergencies happen (it may be different than what you think) and what you can do to avoid them.

Sign up for the webinar now by visiting our webinar page [http://www.percona.com/webinars/2012-01-25-preventing-downtime-in-production-mysql-servers/].