Thanks to everyone who was in attendance on 05 June 2013 for my “Choosing a MySQL HA Solution” webinar. If you weren’t able to make it but are interested in listening to the presentation, it’s currently up and available for viewing over at percona.com.

My apologies if we weren’t able to get to your question during the initial session, so I’ll address those lingering questions in this post, along with providing a bit more detail on some of the questions that I did cover during the session.

Q: What is the reason that I recommended DRBD be used only on physical hardware and not on virtual machines?
A: I covered this a bit during the session, but to provide a bit more commentary. There …

Lately I have been working with a set of customers on a longer term basis which has given me time to explore new tools using their environments.  One tool that I am finding very helpful is called SchemaSpy.

SchemaSpy is a Java-based tool (requires Java 5 or higher) that analyzes the metadata of a schema in a database and generates a visual representation of it in a browser-displayable format. It lets you click through the hierarchy of database tables via child and parent table relationships as represented by both HTML links and entity-relationship diagrams. It’s also designed to help resolve the obtuse errors that a database sometimes gives related to failures due to constraints.

One of the …

On Friday I gave a presentation on “MySQL Query Patterns, Optimized” for Percona MySQL Webinars.  If you missed it, you can still register to view the recording and my slides.

Thanks to everyone who attended, and especially to folks who asked the great questions.  I answered as many as we had time for  during the session, but here are all the questions with my complete answers:

Q: Can you compare the use of subqueries/multiple joins vs. multiple queries (e.g. temp tables)?

For performance, it’s hard to make …

Today’s blog post diving into the waters of the MySQL buffer pool is a cross-post from Groupon’s engineering blog, and is Part 1 of 2. Thank you to Kyle Oppenheim at Groupon for contributing to this project and post. We’ll be posting Part 2 on Thursday. I’ll be at the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo next week in Santa Clara, California so look for me there – I’d love to connect and talk more about MySQL buffer pools or anything else that’s on your mind!

There …

The Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo begins next Monday and runs April 22-25, 2013. Attendees will see great keynotes from leaders in the industry including representatives from Oracle, Amazon Web Services, HP, Continuent, and Percona. They can also participate in thought provoking Birds of a Feather sessions on Tuesday night and the Wednesday night Community Networking Reception will be fun and entertaining with the presentation of the Community Awards and the Lightning Talks.

If you cannot attend the entire Percona Live MySQL Conference but want to take advantage of the keynotes, BOFs, and Community Networking …

In preparing for this month’s Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo, I’ve been reminiscing about the annual MySQL User Conference’s history – the 9 times it previously took place in its various reincarnations – and there are a lot of good things, fun things to remember.

2003 was the year that marked the first MySQL user conference independently organized by MySQL AB. It was called the “MySQL Users Conference” and took place at the Double Tree hotel near the San Jose airport with an estimated 500-600 people attending. Monty and David kicked-off the show with keynotes and I recall one of them saying something like, “12 …

5.6 has redefined MySQL performance and usability. Some great talks at the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo will provide insight into the new features and benefits of this major release. The conference is April 22-25, 2013 at the Santa Clara Convention Center and Hyatt Santa Clara.

Monday evening features the conference Welcome Reception where attendees can relax over food and beverages in the exhibition area following the day’s tutorials. After the Welcome Reception, at 6:30 pm, Oracle is hosting a reception to celebrate MySQL 5.6 going GA which is open to the public (but space is limited and pre-registration is required).

The MySQL 5.6 content continues Tuesday morning when …

Percona CEO Peter Zaitsev leads a track at Percona MySQL University in Raleigh, N.C. on Jan. 29, 2013.

Percona MySQL University, Toronto is taking place this Friday and I’m very excited about this event because it is a special opportunity to fit a phenomenal number of specific and focused MySQL technical talks all into one day, for free.

Over the course of the day we will cover some of the hottest topics in the MySQL space. There will be talks covering topics like MySQL 5.6, MySQL in the Cloud and High Availability for MySQL, as well as Percona XtraDB Cluster for MySQL. We have talks planned for nearly every …

Facebook is a major user of MySQL and has pushed the performance limits of the technology. Their MySQL experts have deep, hands on knowledge of the technology. I’m pleased to welcome Mark Callaghan, Software Engineer for Database Infrastructure at Facebook, back again this year to the Percona Live MySQL Conference & Expo to share his expertise. Mark was a keynote speaker at last year’s conference and will appear this year with a group of Facebook MySQL experts:

• Domas Mituzas, …

Catch the webinar: “Learn How MySQL 5.6 Makes Query Optimization Easier” for more tips on the 5.6 optimizer

While preparing the webinar I will deliver this Friday, I ran into a quite interesting (although not very impacting) optimizer issue: a “SELECT *” taking half the time to execute than the same “SELECT one_indexed_column” query in MySQL 5.6.10.

This turned into a really nice exercise for checking the performance and inner workings of one of the nicest features of the newer MySQL optimizer: the Index Condition Pushdown Optimization, or ICP, which …