I actually don’t remember exactly whether it was in 2006, 2007 or 2008 — but around that time the MySQL community had one of the greatest MySQL conferences put on by O’Reilly and MySQL. It was a good, stable, predictable time.

Shortly thereafter, the MySQL world saw acquisitions, forks, times of uncertainly, more acquisitions, more forks, rumors (“Oracle is going to kill MySQL and the whole Internet”) and just a lot of drama and politics.

And now, after all this time some 6 or 7 years later, it feels like a MySQL Renaissance. All of the major MySQL players are coming to the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo 2013. I am happy to see Oracle’s engineers coming with talks — and now with a great MySQL 5.6 release — and I have great confidence in MySQL’s future with Oracle’s commitment level, coupled with the fact that Percona Server and MariaDB are continuing to mature.

For this year’s conference I am going to give a tutorial titled, “Percona XtraBackup: Old and New Features.” I actually traded my other talk, “MySQL 5.6 improvements from InnoDB internals prospective,” with Oracle’s Sunny Bains and his talk, MySQL 5.6: What’s New in InnoDB. Sunny honestly knows more about InnoDB internals than I do.

There are going to be a lot of great talks, and I would have a hard time listing all of the ones on my list to attend — but you can check all of them out for yourself. But I will say that the greatest part of the conference is not talks, but what happens in between them — in the conference center halls and behind the curtains.

If you are lucky you can grab engineers from Facebook, Twitter, Google, Box, Esty, Pinterest, Tumblr, NING.com… and ask them any question and actually get an answer. You can even catch interesting rumors… and spread some of your own. Basically just be part of the MySQL crowd and really feel the great vibe (especially after a few drinks during the Community Networking Reception).

I am personally looking forward to another lengthy discussion with Dimitri Kravtchuk on how benchmarks should be run, what the next bottleneck in MySQL will be, and how we, with Percona Server, are going to beat MySQL in performance. And you can actually go and ask Sunny anything about InnoDB internals: He is one of the few engineers in the world who knows everything about InnoDB.

If you seriously work with MySQL, then you should not miss the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo 2013. It runs April 22-25 in Santa Clara, California. But just remember: Advanced Rate tickets end on March 24th, so make sure you register this week.

The post Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo 2013: It feels like 2007 again appeared first on MySQL Performance Blog.

Percona CEO Peter Zaitsev leads a track at Percona MySQL University in Raleigh, N.C. on Jan. 29, 2013.

Percona MySQL University, Toronto is taking place this Friday and I’m very excited about this event because it is a special opportunity to fit a phenomenal number of specific and focused MySQL technical talks all into one day, for free.

Over the course of the day we will cover some of the hottest topics in the MySQL space. There will be talks covering topics like MySQL 5.6, MySQL in the Cloud and High Availability for MySQL, as well as Percona XtraDB Cluster for MySQL. We have talks planned for nearly every MySQL developer and DBA, from anyone  just starting with MySQL all the way to those of you who are seasoned MySQL Experts.

In addition to the conference presentations, we are providing you the opportunity to spend 45 (complementary) minutes one-on-one with a Percona MySQL Consulting expert.  Do not delay in reserving your time with a Percona Expert, as the number of available slots are very limited. Reserve your slot from Percona MySQL University event registration page.

Finally we’re going to have a raffle at the end of the day. The prizes include a ticket next month’s Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo 2013 – the largest event of the year in MySQL ecosystem, a full week of Percona Training, a Percona MySQL Support subscription, and more valuable prices.

Percona MySQL University will be held at the FreshBooks offices at 35 Golden Avenue, Suite 105, Toronto, Ontario M6R 2J5. Directions along with the day’s complete agenda and registration details are on our Eventbright page.

We hope you’ll join us and invite your friends and colleagues !

The post Percona MySQL University coming to Toronto this Friday! appeared first on MySQL Performance Blog.

I’ve been woefully neglectful of my responsibilities to post regularly about Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo 2013 (PLCME 2013), but here’s some highlights of what I am planning to attend from the schedule.  Read to the very bottom for the chance to win a free full pass to the conference!

When picking talks to attend, I typically try to balance sessions that will fill in gaps in my knowledge (especially with topics that have come up repeatedly) with sessions on topics that I already specialize in to gain more depth.  Once I’m at a conference, I often will change my plans at the last minute, but here’s what I’d choose today:

Tutorial Day

I’m giving my own all-day tutorial on Percona XtraDB Cluster / Galera in Practice, so naturally I think everyone should come see that one.  This will be extremely hands-on, so don’t expect a 6 hour lecture in disguise.

Day 1

• Percona Server 5.6 – By Stewart Smith of Percona himself
• CAP Theorem: Two out of three ain’t right – (Matt Aslet, 451 Research).  I describe (poorly, I’m sure) the CAP theorem regularly to customers as part of my job, and I’m interested in hearing some more formal discussion of it.  If I wasn’t going here, I’d probably end up in Galera Cluster Best Practices, though I’ve heard that talk from Seppo (Codership) before.
• MySQL Query Anti-Patterns that can be moved to Sphinx – (Vladimir Fedorkov, PalominoDB) Now that Innodb supports Full-text indexing, I’m interested in other good discussion points about when selecting Sphinx would still be useful.
• Tracking Page Changes for Your Database and Bitmap Backups – (Laurynas Biveinis, Percona) — Shoring up information about new Xtrabackup feature sets.
• Internals of new InnoDB features in MySQL 5.6 – (Vadim Tkachenko, Percona) – Tuning Innodb is a huge part of my job, and getting up to 5.6 is a big priority with the recent GA (of course, I may need to do this before April!)

Day 2

• The Hazards of Multi-writing in a Dual-Master Setup – I’m kind of obligated to attend this one, this covers a bit of a 101 about replication conflicts and the general issues with distributed writing.  This is really a foundation for anyone starting to explore how to get beyond a single-mastered data store and why it’s a hard problem to solve.
• State of the Art for MySQL Multi-Master Replication – (Robert Hodges, Continuent) –  Robert is the master in discussing the pros and cons of this kind of architecture, and this really sounds like a logical advanced follow up to my talk.  I’m interested in the latest/greatest out of Tungsten, and also what decision points he tends to bring to the table with this kind of architecture.
• Case Study: Designing a synchronous multi-master cluster for elastic scale-out and scale-in in the cloud – (Marco Tusa, Pythian) – This is right up my alley in terms of the type of work I generally do.  I’m really interested to hear real-life case studies for these kinds of architectures.
• InnoDB Compression: Present and Future – (Nizameddin Ordulu, Justin Tolmer, Facebook) — The Facebook guys really know their Innodb compression, and now that their enhancements are in 5.6, I’m really interested to dig further into it.
• What’s New in Galera Replication 3.0 – (Alexey Yurchenko, Seppo Jaakola, Codership Oy) – This should be a highlight for anyone interested in the Galera/PXC world.  Codership is really planning some exciting things for their 3.0 release.

Day 3

• Migrating to Percona XtraDB cluster – Once again, I am obligated to attend.  This talk will be a great high level overview of PXC/Galera and give some helpful instruction about what some migration strategies might look like.
• Using MySQL Performance Schema to debug performance issues – (Zburivsky Danil, Pythian) – I haven’t explored the performance_schema very much yet, but I need to know more, especially with all the improvements in 5.6!
• Perl Stored Procedures for MariaDB – (Antony Curtis, LinkedIn Corp) – I generally don’t recommend stored procedures, but I need to learn more about Maria, and since Perl is a native language to me, this seems compelling.
• Managing data and data archiving using MySQL 5.6 new features of Portable Tablespace and EXCHANGE PARTITION – (Marco Tusa, Pythian) — This seems like a great 5.6 improvement for manageability of data.

So, that’s it, one talk for each slot.  Tomorrow, I may change my mind, and there are definitely lots of these slots that have some really strong competing talks.

Win a free Conference Pass

Since we’re talking about interesting talks, what talk would you most like to attend at the conference and why?  Best answer in the comments below wins the pass.  Include a link to the talk with your answer.  Answers will be judged entirely (and subjectively) by me.  Deadline is this Friday, February 15th.

The post Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo 2013: The talks I want to see appeared first on MySQL Performance Blog.

Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo 2013 – the largest MySQL Conference event of the year is getting close and we’re now announcing two community activities which are going to happen at this event.

Call of DotOrg Pavilion exhibitors is open – DotOrg pavilion is a free expo hall space for non commercial projects relevant for MySQL community. If you’re working on the project which you would like to get in front of a larger community but can’t afford expo hall exhibitor price tag because of non commercial nature of the project it is a great opportunity to do so. In the previous years participants included projects like PhpMyAdmin, CentOS, Mozilla, MariaDB, Drizzle, MySQL Sandbox. Space is Limited so it is best to Apply Now!

MySQL Community Awards 2013: Call for Nominations is open now with nominations are opened in the categories of “Community Contributor of the Year”, “Application of the year”, “Corporate Contributor of the Year” MySQL Community award is independently organized Community award with ceremony taking place at Community Reception. Please go ahead and nominate your heroes !

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