Have you ever wondered how optimized your Memcached installation is? There is a common misconception that one doesn't have to think too deeply about Memcached performance, but that is not true. If your setup is inefficient, you could:

• Burn Memory
• Waste Network Round-Trips
• Store Keys That Never Get Retrieved
• Have a Low Cache Hit Ratio (i.e. query MySQL too much)
• Suffer a fate too horrible to contemplate.

Percona does a lot of consulting around Memcached, so we try to take a quantitative, scientific approach to measuring memcached performance, just like everything else we do.

memcached is basically a key-value in-memory database, so it works well to analyze its traffic with Maatkit's mk-query-digest tool. You can now use …

The OpenSQLCamp 2009 European edition, is under scrutiny. There are 27 session proposals, from which we will need to get 12 in the schedule.
The open voting is done via Twitter or the mailing list.
I have a good feeling about it. Since I am proposing a public …

There were rumors …

The Call for Papers for the OpenSQL Camp 2009 (European Edition) has ended yesterday — we received 27 excellent session proposals from various Open Source Database projects. I would like to say a big "Thank You" to everyone who submitted a talk! In the beginning I was a bit concerned that the conference would become too MySQL-centric, but this fortunately changed in the last few days.

Sadly we now have more than double the amount of sessions than we can actually host, which means that we will have to review and vote on the sessions to distill the final program. We've formed a small committee that will perform this task (currently consisting of …

Check it out in …

I have had a wish for a few years. I wanted to find a way to put together the valuable information that the community produces about MySQL, a way that would let me easily find the interesting content that I may have missed when on vacation, or when busy with a conference, a company meeting, or a long stream of coding.

That wish started to take shape last year, when I was traveling with Dups during the East Coast tour. I drove, he took notes. He drove, I took more notes. During meals and walking breaks we discussed and refined the idea. When we went back home, a plan was ready. Dups started coding in January.

At first, his changes were completely invisible. He was refactoring the Planet MySQL code to integrate it with the advanced features that had been developed for the main site. After a series of secondary changes, there came the substantial one. The voting …

I have had a wish for a few years. I wanted to find a way to put together the valuable information that the community produces about MySQL, a way that would let me easily find the interesting content that I may have missed when on vacation, or when busy with a conference, a company meeting, or a long stream of coding.

That wish started to take shape last year, when I was traveling with Dups during the East Coast tour. I drove, he took notes. He drove, I took more notes. During meals and walking breaks we discussed and refined the idea. When we went back home, a plan was ready. Dups started coding in January.

At first, his changes were completely invisible. He was refactoring the Planet MySQL code to integrate it with the advanced features that had been developed for the main site. After a series of secondary changes, there came the substantial one. The voting …

I have had a wish for a few years. I wanted to find a way to put together the valuable information that the community produces about MySQL, a way that would let me easily find the interesting content that I may have missed when on vacation, or when busy with a conference, a company meeting, or a long stream of coding.

That wish started to take shape last year, when I was traveling with Dups during the East Coast tour. I drove, he took notes. He drove, I took more notes. During meals and walking breaks we discussed and refined the idea. When we went back home, a plan was ready. Dups started coding in January.

At first, his changes were completely invisible. He was refactoring the Planet MySQL code to integrate it with the advanced features that had been developed for the main site. After a series of secondary changes, there came the substantial one. The voting …

I've now posted all the current talk submissions to the OpenSQL Camp Wiki. A big Thank You to everyone who contributed so far and helped us to bang the drum for this event! If you haven't heard about OpenSQL Camp yet, it's a subconference of the Free and Open Source Conference (FrOSCon) in St. Augustin, Germany, which takes place on August 22+23. The topic of OpenSQL Camp is "Open Source databases and related technologies" and we're looking for interesting presentations in this field.

As we have 12 session slots to fill, we still have room for at least 6 more submissions! It's also a tad bit MySQL-centric at the moment, that should definitely change! We would love to get some more diversity to cover a broader range of Open Source Database technology.

So please submit your talk proposals and help …

Last week I gave a MySQL University Presentation about how to contribute code to MySQL. This time DimDim did not fail to record the session, even though there is a funky overlap of audio from Stefan Hinz (the moderator) and myself at the beginning. I had a bit of a slow start into the presentation, because of a very nasty headache that plagued me that day. But we had a lively discussion at the end and I hope it was useful to the participants.

In case you have missed it, you can now watch the playback or download the session slides:

• Presentation slides: MySQL Code Contributions (PDF)
• …