Its good to announce that Monty Program will have a presence at Percona Live London (October 24 & 25 2011), and we’re very excited about it. There will be two talks (no tutorials this time around):

1. Sergei Golubchik will present on Pluggable Authentication in MySQL and MariaDB. I’ve seen Serg give tutorials to this effect, so expect a lot within half an hour!
2. Colin Charles will present on Why MariaDB? which focuses on what new features are available today in MariaDB and how they benefit users.

Will we see you there? Registrations are still open and we would love to talk to you then.

Monty Program is …

Did you know that the following query actually performs a JOIN? You can’t see it, but it’s there:

SELECT the_day, COUNT(*), SUM(clicks), SUM(cost)
FROM ad_clicks_by_day
WHERE the_day >= …

[ UPDATED 2011-09-22 ] :
For French attendees : Vous participez ou souhaitez participer à cette conférence, rejoignez le groupe de la communauté francophone pour partager autour de cet évènement
For All : Download the take away PDF of the conference here : PLL2011.pdf
For All : Download the schedules : Percona_Live_London2011.ics

I don’t want to debate about the next MySQL Conference here, you can find a great summary post here : …

I am writing this on my blog because I want to take the Percona hat off (partially) and wear my community hat a bit. My loyalty was to the MySQL community long before I was involved with Percona.

There are now three Percona Live events for which we have signed venue contracts and begun plans: London in October, Washington DC in January, and Santa Clara in April. I have insider knowledge of what’s going on with planning all three events, and I’m proud and happy that I have a community-member seat at the table.

The London event, which is October 24-25, will be a natural interpolation between the medium size of our very successful event earlier this year in New York, and the much larger Santa Clara event next year in April. We’re adding a day of tutorials and more speaking …

The first Percona Live Conferences in San Francisco and New York were such wonderful successes that we have been inspired to take it across the ocean into the UK. We are therefore proud to announce that our next Percona Live Conference will be held London October 24-25, 2011 . Registration is now open and we are offering an early-bird registration for eager attendees who appreciate a discount. Register here: http://www.eventbrite.com/event/1909670877/eorg/

Additionally, the Percona Live team is ready to accept submissions of talks and/or tutorials from individuals who wish to speak at this two day event. Please go here: http://www.percona.com/live/london-2011/call-for-speakers/ to submit your talks.

Whether you are a speaker or an attendee, there are a …

This week we post th' audio from th' closin' keynote o' Percona Live by Harrison Fisk o' Facebook, "MySQL at Facebook, Current and Future", I'll warrant ye. There is no ear candy this week.

Percona Live – New York video recordings are now available on our website. Check it out.

Many people consider this information in the MySQL Query Execution Plan (QEP) to indicate that the referenced table is using an index. It actually means that ONLY the index is used. This can for larger and more frequent queries provide a significant boost.

In a recent example, adding an index dropped a query from 190ms to 6ms. However adding a better index dropped that 6ms query to 1.2ms. When executed 100s/1000s of times per second these millisecond improvements can have a huge benefit in greater scalability. While people often tune slow running queries, in a well tuned system shaving milliseconds of queries, in this example making 6ms query 80% better is a far greater improvement.

You can get a detailed explanation of how to identify, create and verify covering indexes from my Percona Live presentation Improving performance …

Yesterday, Percona held Percona Live NYC, which they describe as an “intensive one-day MySQL summit.” They meant it. It was like drinking from a firehose. There was too much for me to give a complete report, so I’d like to highlight two sessions that stuck out for me.

Why SQL Wins

Sergei Tsarev (Clustrix) gave a great overview of the last 50 years of database development. He talked about the early days, in which what we now think of as database functionality had to be implemented in each application. Programmer productivity was therefore low.

As modern SQL databases emerged, productivity shot up since databases bundled up common functionality with an easy-to-code interface. This now seems like a golden age of databases, in which transactional semantics were hashed out.

Fast forward to today. Database performance has failed to keep up with …

We all know that Kurt von Finck is going to give a talk at Percona Live NYC happening May 26 2011. If you want to attend we’ve got three tickets to give away (worth USD$249 each).

This should be the easiest contest ever to enter and win. Just go to the Knowledgebase, create an account and write one new article, longer than 2 paragraphs. Once you’re done, send a quick email to community@montyprogram.com with a link to the article, and if there is no duplicate content already on the Knowledgebase, you’ll get your ticket to Percona Live NYC.

Good luck!

Contest ends May 24 2011, noon, UTC+0.