We've just launched training for London, Seattle, San Francisco, Atlanta, Orlando, Columbus, Dallas, San Diego, Denver, Minneapolis, New York City, …

I’ll be helping Morgan Tocker deliver the second half of his training course for MySQL Developers/DBAs in New York City in a few days (more Percona training). It was a snap decision at the last minute, but I’m hoping I’ll still get to meet some folks there. If we’ve corresponded over email or blog comments and you would like to get together, ping me in the comments here!

If you’re in the New York City area and you use MySQL, you should consider attending this course, too. Morgan knows his stuff and has written a good curriculum. Attendees give his courses excellent feedback, and the price is very reasonable. Oh, and I’ll be there too, did I mention that? You can pick my …

I am writing because Sheeri sent me a note about a blog post written by Brian Aker, where Brian concludes, quite correctly, that (in Sheeri’s words not Brian’s)


MySQL is now just a branch (the official branch,
but a branch nonetheless, and a bunch of trademark (logo) and
copyright (docs) ownerships).


This is exactly true. No denying it. Why bother. It’s true. It’s also true for the vast majority of open-source projects, by the way.

I replied to Sheeri:


There's no denying that. The product direction will be set by whoever sets the best product management strategy backed by the most effective development effort. And there can be multiple winners.
-Paul


Well, this is the kind of quality output I can be relied on. It might not fit on twitter, but it’s …

Our patches for 5.0 have attracted significant interest.  You can read about SecondLife's experience here, as well as what Flickr had to say on their blog.  The main improvements come in both performance gains and improvements to diagnostics (such as the improvements to the slow log output, and INDEX_STATISTICS).

Despite having many requests to port these patches to 5.1, we simply haven't had the bandwidth as our main focus has been on developing XtraDB and XtraBackup.  Thankfully a customer (who prefers to stay unnamed) as stood up and sponsored the work to move the patches to 5.1.

To refresh, the most interesting patches are:

• Performance patches for InnoDB ®. Although …

After a nice long vacation, it's time to unveil our destinations for public classes in 2010.  We are now offering a course for Developers as well as DBAs.  The dates are:

• Seattle 16 February
• San Francisco 18-19 February
• Boston 22-23 February
• New York City 25-26 February
• Montréal …

Check out how Linden Labs, creators of the popular game Second Life, upgraded their MySQL database. The MySQL they use? Straight out of Debian! Of course, now, they’re running with the Percona patchset, against MySQL 5.0.84. Definitely a good read.

Its good to see Lars post about contributing to the MySQL replication & backup codebase. It sounds like the replication & backup team have decided that mentoring is the way to go – you get a “coach developer” if the idea is accepted. I like this very much, and sincerely hope it spreads to the rest of the server; it will help decentralise …

We're hiring. We are looking for the following qualifications:

1. Expert knowledge of MySQL. Not just "certified" -- years of production experience with it. You need to know server internals, for example. You need to be able to do anything from optimizing difficult queries to moving high-volume services between data centers without interruption.
2. Expert knowledge of InnoDB. You should understand its inner workings well enough to answer questions about its internals from memory, such as "how does the insert buffer work?" or "how does MVCC work on secondary indexes?" You should also know why it has trouble on some workloads and how to solve that.
3. Expert knowledge of Linux systems administration. You need to know how to solve issues with filesystems, hardware, and networking. You need to be able to use tools such as gdb, strace, tcpdump, etc to solve weird problems.
4. Expert with Apache, memcached, and other …

Last week I attended the Enterprise LAMP Summit and Camp in Nashville, Tennessee. I enjoyed the event and met or reconnected with a lot of great people. I was glad to be able to spend time with some folks from the Postgres community. My own sessions focused on MySQL.

During the Summit I tried to help people understand how to think about performance, and made the case that the Percona versions of the MySQL server are not only the highest-performance available, but uniquely provide the instrumentation necessary to follow a disciplined performance optimization process such as Method R or Goal-Driven Performance Optimization.

At the Camp the next day, there were several sessions on MySQL. My talk was later in the day, so I elected to skip …

We've been busy expanding our training curriculum to include training for developers building applications with MySQL.  We have reached the point where we're ready for a pilot teach - and it brings me great pleasure to announce that we're opening it up for blog readers to attend, free of charge.

The details:
San Francisco
4th December
9:30AM - 5PM

Spaces are limited, so to give everyone a fair chance we're delaying registration to open at noon tomorrow (Friday) Pacific Time. It's strictly first in first served, so be quick!  The registration link is here.

Entry posted by Morgan Tocker | One comment

Add to: …

You can now apt-get your way to MariaDB 5.1, courtesy of OurDelta and in close cooperation with Monty Program Ab. To get started, simple follow the info on the Debian and Ubuntu pages.

Quick overview

• For MariaDB we use different repository directories to ensure that you can’t accidentally upgrade or revert major versions without you explicitly choosing to do so.
• At this point we have Ubuntu Hardy, Intrepid, Jaunty and Karmic for you, as well as Debian 4 (Lenny). Etch (Debian 4) is waiting on a small fix (thanks to Antony Curtis for helping with that).
• The package names start with mariadb*, except …