On July 16 I’ll be presenting my next webinar focusing on common mistakes committed by MySQL users.

How to Avoid Even More of the Common (but Deadly) MySQL Development Mistakes

“Why can’t I just save my data to a file?”

Using an SQL database seems so complex to get right, and for good reason. The variety of data-driven applications is practically limitless, and as project requirements change, we find ourselves taking shortcuts and adopting bad habits. But there are proven methods to understanding how to develop and manage data in a scalable and reliable way. This talk shows you some of these methods, including:

• How to optimize a database application with partitioning and sharding.
• How to avoid the secret security …

We recently released a new version of Percona Cloud Tools with MySQL monitoring capabilities. Join me June 25 and learn the details about all of the great new features inside Percona Cloud Tools – which is now free in beta. The webinar is titled “Monitoring All (Yes, All!) MySQL Metrics with Percona Cloud Tools” and begins at 10 a.m. Pacific time.

In addition to MySQL metrics, Percona Cloud Tools also monitors OS performance-related stats. The new Percona-agent gathers metrics with fine granularity (up to once per second), so you are able to see any of these metrics updated real-time.

During the webinar I’ll explain how the new Percona-agent works and how to configure it. And I’ll demonstrate the standard dashboard with the most important MySQL …

The architecture of MySQL-powered applications is one of my favorite topics to talk about. It’s a very important topic because if you do not get the architecture right then you’re very likely to fail with your project – either from the standpoint of failing with performance, high availability or security requirements… or failing to deliver on time and at the planned cost.

It’s also a great topic because there is so much knowledge available these days about MySQL-powered applications. MySQL has been around for a rather long time compared with many other solutions – and now we know what architectures have enabled people to build successful MySQL-powered applications and grow them to hundreds of millions of users as well as what applications did not work out.

This level of maturity really allows us to essentially take “off-the-shelf” MySQL architectures that can be used to build very …

We recently open-sourced our percona-agent and if you check out the source code, you’ll find that it is written in the Go programming language (aka Golang). For those not up to speed, the percona-agent is a real-time client-side agent for Percona Cloud Tools.

Our requirements are quite demanding for our agents. This one is software that works on a real production server, so it must be fast, reliable, lightweight and easy to distribute. Surprisingly enough, binaries compiled by Go fit these characteristics.

There are of course alternatives that we considered. On the scripting side: Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby et al. These are not necessarily fast, and the distribution is also interesting. We have enough experience with …

Achieving the best possible MySQL Performance doesn’t have to be complicated. It’s all about knowing which tools are designed for the task at hand – along with some basic (yet often overlooked) best practices.

Join me Wednesday, May 14 at 10 a.m. Pacific for a free webinar titled, “Practical MySQL performance optimization.” I’ll be sharing the main areas for improving MySQL performance – along with what to specifically focus on in each. These will include:

• Hardware
• MySQL Configuration
• Schema and Queries
• Application Architecture

And as I mentioned earlier, I’ll also show you the best tools for the job and how …

Tools for MySQL are a vital part of any deployment, so it’s important to use ones that are reliable and well-designed. Percona Toolkit is a collection of more than 30 command-line tools for MySQL, Percona Server, and MariaDB that can help database administrators automate a variety of database and system tasks. With so many available tools, however, it can be difficult knowing where to start.

For this reason I invite you to join me on Wednesday, May 7 at 10 a.m. Pacific time for a free webinar titled, “The top 9 Percona Toolkit tools that can make your job easier.” You can register directly …

Next Wednesday, I will present a webinar about MySQL performance profiling tools that every MySQL DBA should know.

Application performance is a key aspect of ensuring a good experience for your end users. But finding and fixing performance bottlenecks is difficult in the complex systems that define today’s web applications. Having a method and knowing how to use the tools available can significantly reduce the amount of time between problems manifesting and fixes being deployed.

In the webinar, titled “Optimizing MySQL Performance: Choosing the Right Tool for the Job,” we’ll start with the basic top, iostat, and vmstat then move onto advanced tools like GDB, Oprofile, and Strace.

I’m looking forward to this webinar and invite you to join us April 16th at 10 a.m. Pacific time. You can learn more and also  …

I’m looking forward to Wednesday’s joint webinar on MySQL clustering technologies with Matt Aslett, research director of data management and analytics over at 451 Research. We’ll be participating in a live, in-depth discussion of MySQL Clustering for High Availability and Scalability.

Matt will present an overview of the trends driving adoption of clustering technology. He’ll also discuss the key technologies and criteria that developers and administrators need to consider when thinking about clustering, in order to improve their likelihood of success.

For my part, I’ll be focusing on a more technical overview of benefits and drawbacks of different clustering …

On Wednesday I gave a presentation on “How to Avoid Common (but Deadly) MySQL Development Mistakes” for Percona MySQL Webinars. If you missed it, you can still register to view the recording and my slides.

Thanks to everyone who attended, and especially to folks who asked the great questions. I answered as many as we had time for during the session, but here are all the questions with my complete answers:

Q: Does a JOIN operation between two tables always produce an “access table” on the rows of the first table of the join, or it is possible to define an index (COVERING INDEX) to avoid this access to the first table?

Yes, if your …

Next Wednesday, Severalnines CTO Johan Andersson and I will co-present a webinar about ClusterControl, a cluster management tool created by Severalnines that can monitor Percona XtraDB Cluster. It provides DBAs with the right metrics to manage and optimize applications during development and production.

In the webinar, titled “Performance Monitoring and Troubleshooting of Percona XtraDB Cluster,” we will discuss ClusterControl in general, and then we will explain how to install ClusterControl 1.2.5 in agentless mode. This is a particularly interesting use-case for me because in this …