Usually people do this around New Year, I will do it in February. Actually, I was inspired to do this after reviewing all the talks for this year's MySQL Conference - what a snapshot into the state of where we are! It made me realize we've made important progress in the past year, worth taking a moment to celebrate it. So here we go...

Diversification

In the past few years there was a lot of fear and doubt about MySQL due to Oracle taking over the ownership. But if you ask me, I was more worried for MySQL because of MySQL itself. I've often said that if MySQL had been a healthy open source project - like the other 3 components in the LAMP stack - then most of the NoSQL technologies we've seen come about would never have been started as their own projects, because it would have been more natural to build those needs on …

The program for this year's MySQL conference is now published.

As regular readers will remember, I served on the program committee this year and was one of those who appealed for people to send in great proposals. I would now like to thank all of you that sent in proposals. On my quick count we had over 250 proposals, and if I look at my own ratings I'd say about 180 of them were really good, conference worthy talks (and this already excludes some pretty good talks). A related piece of trivia was that this might have been the first year ever that the deadline for the Call for Proposals wasn't extended, which possibly took some of you by surprise. We simply got so many good talks by the deadline, that there wasn't any need to. …

Just wanted to say I'm so happy: http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2012/01/09/announcement-of-percona-x...

And also that this is a significant moment in the evolution of MySQL - things will never be the same again.

First of all, I wish you a happy new year.
Many things happened last year, it was really exciting to be involved in the MySQL ecosystem.
I hope this enthusiasm will be increased this year, up to you !

To start the year, I propose the MySQL[plus] Awards 2011
It will only take 5 minutes to fill out these polls.
Answer with your heart first and then with your experience with some of these tools or services.

Polls will be closed January 31, so, vote now !
For “other” answers, please,  let me a comment with details.

Don’t hesitate to submit proposal for tools or services in the comments.
And, please, share these polls !

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, …

MySQL::Sandbox 3.0.24 was released yesterday, with many new features. More than vanilla MySQLIf you have missed my previous announcement, here's the gist of it. MySQL Sandbox can now deal with tarballs from either Percona Server or MariaDB. The main difference after this change is that you can now create a directory called <PREFIX>5.5.16 and make_sandbox will recognize it as well as the plain 5.5.16.

$ make_sandbox --export_binaries --add_prefix=ps \
   Percona-Server-5.5.11-rel20.2-114.Darwin.i386.tar.gz  \
   -- --sandbox_directory=msb_ps5_5_11
unpacking Percona-Server-5.5.11-rel20.2-114.Darwin.i386.tar.gz
[…]
installing with the following …

A year ago I posted a blog on The state of MySQL forks: co-operating without co-operating. (Also Giuseppe wrote about the topic at that time, and Peter Zaitsev covers it in his conference keynotes.) So I've been wondering if it would be good to write an update on the topic now, and in that case what to write.

read more

It's that time of the year where MySQL would be speakers are called to action. As usual, the main event is the MySQL spring conference, this year hosted by Percona. The call for participation to the MySQL Conference And Expo 2012 is still open until December 5th. To submit a proposal, you should register as a speaker and then fill in the form.
There is a conference committee which is already busy evaluating the proposals that have been submitted so far. The committee is demanding (I know for a fact, since I am in it!) and therefore, if you want to submit something, be very critical with yourself and polish your …

Some of you may be aware that MySQL is increasingly using an Oracle-internal bug tracker. You can see these large bug numbers mentioned alongside smaller public bug numbers in recent MySQL release notes. If you’re particularly unlucky, you  just get a big Oracle-internal bug number. For a recently fixed bug, I dug further, posted up on the Percona blog: http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2011/11/20/bug12704861/

Possibly interesting reading for those of you who interested in InnoDB, MySQL, BLOBs and crash recovery.

There's now 2 weeks left of the Call for Papers for Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo (Santa Clara, CA). This weekend I've been finalizing my abstracts for submission and I trust many of you are doing the same. (If nothing else, do it for the free entrance! Or because you're passionate about MySQL, yeah, that's what I meant...)

This is the main annual MySQL event, so I thought it is worth the bandwidth to use these two weeks for some discussion and brainstorming. We are the MySQL community, it's up to us to make this a great conference now! This year I'm on the program committee, so I'm looking forward to reviewing many, many great proposals. At the same time, I'm interested to hear what you, dear readers - and hopefully future conference visitors - are interested in seeing at the conference? I'll share my ideas here and you can share yours in the comments …

Part of my job at Percona is to perform customer audits.  I’ve had fun the last week getting up to speed on some of the great tools in the Percona Toolkit.  I’m sure people have talked about these before, but to be honest, I always found it hard to take the time to learn new tools, and at my previous job there were often a lot of tools in-house that made it easier to avoid learning something new.  The great thing about the Percona tools is that they aren’t environment dependent (as much as is possible), they typically only require Perl to run.

So, with that being said, I wanted to just go through a few of the tools I learned about this last week that I found useful.

pt-collect:

The collect script collects information.  A lot of information.  I ran it for 10 minutes on a customer’s server and …