Why this article?

First of all, because I had fun digging in the code.

Then, I was reading a lot about the improvements we will have in MySQL 5.6 and about some already present in 5.5. Most of them are well covered by people that certainly know more than me, so I read and read, but after a while became curious. I began reading the code and performing tests. I started to compare versions, like 5.1 – 5.5. – 5.6. One of the things I was looking for was how the new Purge thread mechanism works and what were its implications. I have to say that it seems to work better than the previous versions, and the Dimitry blog (see reference) seems to confirm that.

So again, why the article? Because I think there are some traps here and there, and I feel the need to write about them. The worse behavior is with MySQL 5.5. This is because in 5.5 we have an intermediate situation, where the purge is not fully …

Following a brief list of what I have found more interesting during the last two weeks. Up to now, April has being a great month for MySQL. MySQL Conference  – Percona conference 2012 The Percona MySQL 2012 conference, has seen the MySQL community, interact as it was doing many years ago, re-creating the dynamic and creative [...]

The journey to the Hotel in Santa Clara took me something like 16 hours. It was long, arduous and at times despairing, but was it worth it? Absolutely! I made the epic journey with my Pythian (and former Nokia) colleague Andrew Moore, and once at the conference we met up with more members of our [...]

MySQLBoy attends the annual MySQL Conference and Expo host by Percona. [part 1 of 2]

Day 1 is the first official day of the Percona Live MySQL Conference. It began with two mini keynotes by Peter Zaitev and Baron Schwarz of Percona talking about the history of MySQL and his beginnings in the open source movement, respectively. It was very nostalgic, and I’m sure it brought a tear to a few people’s eyes.

Following the dynamic duo was full keynotes by Mårten Mickos (Eucalyptus Systems) on “Making LAMP a Cloud” and Brian Aker (HP) on “The New MySQL Cloud Ecosystem”. To be honest, I found the full keynotes to be quite disappointing. For me, the keynotes speeches should be about a topic that is visionary or notable in some way. What I got from the keynotes were:  MySQL is good, MySQL is growing, let me show you my product around MySQL, and buy/use my product. They felt far more like glorified sales pitches.

I remember that at the last conference I attended, SXSW Interactive, the keynotes by Ray …

Day 0 of the MySQL Conference was a day unlike any other day. It was, in fact, tutorial day. While regular days of the Percona Live MySQL Conference feature 50 minute sessions, usually split into a 40 minute talk and a 5-10 minute question period, tutorials are 3-hour-long sessions (with a generous 10 minute break in the middle for those that wish to go to the WC) that provide an in-depth dive into some aspect of MySQL. Due to the length of the tutorials, they are more in-depth and technical than individual sessions can be, but at the same time, we are limited to 2 tutorials slots per day instead of the 5 for sessions.The tutorial schedule for the conference is located here, and with so many good ones, it was hard to choose which one(s) to go to.For the morning session, I attended Peter Zaitev’s tutorial entitled “InnoDB and XtraDB …

MySQL Cluster Performance Tuning ——————————————- In this session we will look at different tuning aspects of MySQL Cluster. As well as going through performance tuning basics in MySQL Cluster, we will look closely at the new parameters and status variables of MySQL Cluster 7.2 to determine issues with e.g disk data performance and query (join) [...]

Using and benchmarking Galera in different architectures ———————————————————- What I was interested most during the second day was again, synchronous replication and Replication solutions provide from Continuent. The first I attend in the day was the Galera one, done Henrik and Alexey. The presentation was going to talk about: “We will present results from benchmarking [...]

A panel on “Future Perfect: The Road Ahead for MySQL“, by Brian Aker (HP), Paul Mikesell (Clustrix), Sundar Raghavan (Amazon), Slavik Markovich (McAffee), and Ori Hernstadt (Akiban).

If there’s one common theme to this panel and  this whole conference, it’s: “We’re hiring!” It is amazing how much talent there is at the conference this year, and yet, it isn’t enough. Pythian is hiring as well of course: http://bit.ly/pythianjobs.

There was an interesting distinction between the mindset of Oracle and of MySQL made by Brian Aker: database as a service, which is something MySQL seems to be getting to. It comes with its own problems, especially around trust levels, which will lead to more thinking around data security (rather than just database security).

MySQL vs. NoSQL. Different Tools for Different Jobs …

Here it is finally: The MySQL conference 2012 starts with the Keynote Sessions.

The first keynote speech was by Peter Zaitsev, founder of Percona and a very smart guy, and by Baron Schwartz (Percona), another very smart guy, the brain behind a number of toolkits for MySQL. They’re talking about the MySQL Evolution – what I alluded to in my first post regarding this conference – the ways in which MySQL has grown, evolved, scaled and continues to make new inroads into new applications and industries.

From Peter: “What is most important hasn’t changed – MySQL is still a great piece of technology and it is evolving very rapidly.” (Love that quote!) Also “MySQL is also buzzword compatible: NoSQL, BigData.”

From Baron: He talked about his own personal journey from closed-source, proprietory to open-source, and the …