All of us here at Percona warmly invite you to Percona Performance Conference 2009 on April 22 and 23, 2009 in the Hyatt Regency in Santa Clara, California. The theme for the conference is Performance Is Everything. This conference is about application performance overall, not just databases. Attendance is free of charge for everyone. Experts in many types of technologies -- databases, search, cloud computing, massively parallel computing, client-side optimization -- will present their real-life experience.

In order to forestall speculations and prevent people from jumping to unwarranted negative conclusions, I'd like to take a moment and explain the story behind this event. Some of you have noticed that there were no sessions from Percona this year on the schedule for the …

When I read Monty's post on leaving this passage struck me the most.

The main reason for leaving was that I am not satisfied with the way the MySQL server has been developed, as can be seen on my previous blog post. In particular I would have like to see the server development to be moved to a true open development environment that would encourage outside participation and without any need of differentiation on the source code. Sun has been considering opening up the server development, but the pace has been too slow.

In short, Sun isn't open enough. I think I've said that enough, it's typically more Open Core than Open Source .. and for a growing amount of people.. that isn't good enough.

Reacting on that post we see Matt Asay …

This new release of Gearman includes improved client library code, a few bug fixes, new benchmarking tools, and man pages for the API. I also changed the default port in this release to use our new IANA assigned port, 4730 (was previously 7003). This means if you try to mix existing APIs or job servers with this release, you’ll need to specify port options on one side to make sure they match up. You can find the new tarballs on the Gearman Download page or on Launchpad.

I’ve also released a new version of the Gearman MySQL UDFs due to some of the C library changes. You can find the updated tarballs on the Gearman Download page or on …

So being that I am a support engineer with Sun/MySQL, I figured I would chime in with my opinion of MySQL 5.1 GA so far since I have been using it for a while. For history, I have been with MySQL AB/Sun since the 4.0 release cycle. This post does not represent any official views of my employer, Sun Microsystems, and all such disclaimers.

First off, I want to say that Sun assisted greatly with MySQL 5.1. I think it is a much better release than it would have been with MySQL AB doing the release. I do think this will continue in the future from everything I have experienced and seen so far. Sun knows how to make solid software.


So do I think that 5.1 was released too early? Not at all from my experiences of the MySQL releases. 5.1 is fairing quite well, and I think everyone that has a reason to upgrade to it (such as less locking for InnoDB auto_increment, partitioning, dynamic logging, etc...) should certainly …

Ok, I am perplexed… i don’t say that often.   I have the privilege of testing out a couple of Dolphin Interconnects with Waffle Grid.   They are proving to substantially improve our transactions throughput, I mean we are getting 3x performance over 1gbe…. but what is perplexing is each run going over the faster interconnects results in 1/3 of the memcached sets/gets that occur when testing over 1gbe!  Same datasets, same tests, repeatable results.  See here:

1gbe:
         cmd_get: 771811
cmd_set: 784119

Dolphin:

         cmd_get: 239423
cmd_set: 271259

So instead of testing out the interconnect performance, I am really seeing better results from a higher cache hit rate.  Less items are hitting the LRU.   So what could it …

Sun and O’Reilly have invited Percona to host their already-planned “Percona Performance Conference” in parallel to the MySQL Conference & Expo and the MySQL Camp, at the Santa Clara Convention Center. I am very glad to report that Percona accepted our invitation and will join under the C&E umbrella, making an even richer experience for all pilgrims seeking enlightenment in Santa Clara next April.

The “Percona Performance Conference” is a new two-day event, a sort of mini-conference where Percona experts and guests will speak on high-performance LAMP topics.

It’s also my pleasure to note three new presentations added to the MySQL Conference and Expo (C&E) agenda:

• Make your life easier with Maatkit, Baron Schwartz
• InnoDB Performance and Usability Patches, Vadim Tkachenko
• Innodb database recovery techniques, Peter Zaitsev

Ideally I would have …

There are some basic, golden rules when it comes to having a vibrant community of contributors.

The following are rules I have extracted and learned based on my experience managing and working with engineers actively involved and participating in the Apache/Derby, PostgreSQL and MySQL open-source communities. These rules are also based on extensive discussions with many folks involved with the MySQL community, with the PostgreSQL community and with the Apache/Derby (Java DB) community, over many years.

Before I go through these rules, I would like to thank Marten Mickos for having suggested some of the headings for these rules. (I originally had much longer headings for all of them.) I would also like to thank many of MySQL, PostgreSQL and Java DB colleagues, as well as to many other colleagues involved in open-source development, for having contributed to the ideas and practices behind these rules.

A) …

The Data Warehouse Institute conference in Las Vegas is just a few weeks away. While there aren't any presentations directly on open source, the Evaluating ETL Tools and Technology course I'm teaching on Tuesday will have two open source vendors included in the "vendors in action" session.

We're running a "low-cost ETL" theme for the afternoon. The vendors demonstrating their data integration tools will be Microsoft, Pentaho and Talend. This is a rare chance to see all three doing their work side-by-side.

The exhibit hall will have several open source or open source-derived vendors as well. Be sure to check them out if you're going to the event.

In the previous post of this series we installed and set up VirtualBox. We prepared it for a default install of CentOS 5.2. This time, we cover the installation of the OS itself. Changes since the last article are an upgrade from v2.0 to v2.1, and the fact that I’m running VirtualBox on my Asus [...]

Over the past few weeks, I have been happy working on Drizzle. Why have I been happy? Is it because of some new incredible code that will revolutionize the database industry? Nope. Is it because we've been able to remove all the issues that plague the server core? Nope. Is it because I see Drizzle quickly morphing into a modular, standard-conforming super-kernel? Nope.

So, why am I joyous?

To paraphrase the late Charlton Heston: "[Drizzle] is people!"

Recently, I've seen the fruit that transparent, open source development bears. This fruit takes the form of engaged, motivated, and humble individuals who wish to make their mark on a project.

Whether it's on IRC on #drizzle, the …