As we've said before, the Percona team just keeps growing. This time around, I'm pleased to welcome Ryan and Vladimir.

Ryan Lowe initially joined us from Florida (USA) in June. In his previous lives he scaled an Alexa top 1000 site with a sharded MySQL backend, worked in aerospace, worked in telecom, and lots of other things. His background as a consultant, DBA (with Oracle, too!), DBA manager, and programmer makes him a great match for Percona's clients. He also contributed some improvements to Wordpress, and he blogs here and on Pablowe.

Vladimir Fedorkov joins us from Lipetsk in the Russian Federation. (Brrr!) Vladimir and Peter have known each …

One of the services we (Sun/MySQL) offer is a Performance Tuning and Optimization consulting package. These consulting engagements generally take several different forms as each client has a specific need that must be resolved. But there is a commonality between all of these assignments, they all require some amount of bottleneck detection as well as benchmarking. The topic of benchmarking and bottleneck detection is huge, and has a very broad audience. I really can not do it justice in a single post or two. In fact we are actually planning to give a Webinar in March ( more details will be forth coming ) talking about how we go about finding bottlenecks while out at client sites, and even in an hour I can barely scratch the surface.

What I thought I would share are a few of the easier cases of finding and fixing a bottleneck I have encountered. I am still amazed that more people have not performed similar steps to eliminate …

Today I spent a couple of hours at Amazon, because I have a friend who works there who invited me, giving some completely unstructured presentations.

The first I call "All these MySQL forks. WTF?!", giving some history and background and direction and impressions on MySQL mainline development, the Percona tree, the OurDelta effort, and of course Drizzle.

The second I call "Why distributed source control rocks!", talking about the workflow of git/bzr/hg compared and contrasted with p4/svn.

It was fun. And I had some ideas for bzr (that can also work for git and hg) that I will mention in a later post.

Mark Wong’s entry titled “Following up a couple questions from the presentation at PSU on January 8, 2009” just caught my eye:

What is ‘iopp’?

It’s a custom tool to go through the Linux process table to get i/o statistics per process. It is open source and can be downloaded from:

http://git.postgresql.org/?p=~markwkm/iopp.git;a=summary

If you know me, you know I [...]

I didn't want to get involved, but Jan caught me in the tell-seven-things-about-you game. The rules:

• Link your original tagger(s), and list these rules on your blog.
• Share seven facts about yourself in the post - some random, some weird.
• Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
• Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs and/or Twitter.

Here are the seven facts about me:

1. Nobody among my parents and siblings speaks any foreign language. On the other hand, my wife speaks four languages, my sisters-in-law at least three each, and my father-in-law speaks seven languages fluently.
…

It’s done!

Even if it took a while, too long, really, we finally have the MySQL Proxy code out in the open, where it belongs.

As part of this effort, we would also like to make our development process more transparent. To that effect, we’ve also created a Launchpad team that serves as a discussion hub. It comes with a mailing list, reachable at mysql-proxy-discuss@lists.launchpad.net, where we hope to have some interesting discussions about where to take Proxy, what to implement in what way, and of course to offer advice to users.

There’s not much in terms of “process” yet and quite possibly (and hopefully) it will stay this way, but let me outline some of my hopes and plans for going forward:

Pushing directly into the branches …

Yesterday I dropped a note on twitter about the fact that we opened up another position for Drizzle.

Last month we tracked that 38 out of the 42 developers that have contributed committed code (which does not even begin to cover our translation work/website/documentation). It means that Sun employees who contribute to Drizzle make up today about 1/6th of the project today. There is plenty of active work going on with Drizzle right now, and the effort is growing.

What are we, Sun, looking for? People who already contribute to Drizzle. Not because we are going to hire up all 42, but because people who …

A user recently asked:I'm learning traditional Relational Databases (with PostgreSQL) and doing some research I've come across some new types of databases. CouchDB, Drizzle, and Scalaris to name a few, what is going to be the next database technologies to deal with?SQL is a language for querying and manipulating relational databases. SQL is dictated by an international standard. While the

Happy New Year!

MySQL University sessions are starting again after the winter break. This Thursday, we're beginning with Tim Cook's presentation on low-level locking in mysqld and InnoDB – the good, the bad, and the ugly. Tim works in the Performance and Applications Engineering department at Sun Microsystems. Expect to get some deep insights into the inner workings of the MySQL Server and InnoDB.

Tim's based in California, so note that his session will start rather late for Europeans.

For MySQL University sessions, point your browser to this page. You need a browser with a working Flash plugin. You may …

Australia apparently denied short-term visas to MySQL employees, but it sure hasn't stopped MySQL's progress in the country.