Couchbase raises $14m. AppFog raises $8m. Much ado about Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo. And more.

# Couchbase raised $14m in series C funding for its NoSQL database.

# AppFog raised $8m series B funding for its PHP-based platform-as-a-service.

# Percona announced its plans to host a Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo on April 10-12, effectively replacing the O’Reilly MySQL Conference and Expo.

# The announcement sparked some rumblings of discomfort around the MySQL community with Giuseppe Maxia and …

Last week, Baron Schwartz announced the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo 2012.

Percona organized MySQL related conferences and seminars before, and from what I've heard, with considerable success and to satisfaction of its attendees, and there's one coming up in London in October 2011. But arguably, last week's announcement is quite different from the prior Percona conferences. It's different, because it seeks to replace the annual O'Reilly MySQL Conference and Expo.

Everyone that has read the announcement will have no trouble recognizing it as a replacement, …

We wanted to optimize and test backups for one of our new large scale setup before we could finalize on the backup plan. Our challenge was the data volume was almost 30x more than our normal volumes. Since this involved large volume of data we thought this might be a good candidate to test incremental backups. We wrote a wrapper script to save the states between full backups and incremental backups and did some tests with smaller data sets. It worked perfectly fine. The version of xtrabackup we were testing was 1.6.2.

The incremental backups were completing well within 30minutes. We set out to test what would happen if the amount of incremental diff was large. While doing this test, we started getting backup failures with the following error

20110726_225312.log-110727 00:56:10 innobackupex: Starting to backup .frm, .MRG, .MYD, .MYI,
20110726_225312.log-innobackupex: …

The past few years of MySQL conferences...

Every year since Oracle's acquisition of MySQL in 2009, there's been some uncertainty around the annual MySQL conference, which used to be co-organized by MySQL AB (in charge of content) and O'Reilly (conference logistics). As my career unfolded during those years, I've seen relatively close how the conferences of 2010 and 2011 happened. As there's been a lot of re-structuring in the community around various forks and new employers, I've felt that the annual conference was the one thing that kept us together, the one common forum where everyone would meet. For this reason I have been personally very engaged (as have many others) in helping O'Reilly get through the conferences of 2010 and 2011 and I'm very grateful to Tim, Gina and the rest of the O'Reilly team that they have provided us with this forum and gravitation point for the past two years.

During this years conference it was openly …

Percona has announced Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo 2012. Kudos for their vision and entrepreneurship. I have seen comments praising their commitment to the community and their willingness to filling a void. I have to dot a few i's and cross some t's on this matter.
That was not the only game in town.By the end of June, there were strong clues that O'Reilly was not going to organize a conference. The question of who could fill the void started to pop up. The MySQL Council started exploring the options for a community-driven conference to replace the missing one. The general plan was along the lines of "let's see who is in, and eventually run a conference without the big organizer. If nobody steps up, the IOUG can offer a venue in Las Vegas for an independent MySQL conference". The plan required general …

Google and Microsoft trade patent claims. Actuate announces Q2 results. And more.

# Google accused Microsoft, Oracle, Apple and other companies of organising a hostile patent campaign against Android. That prompted Microsoft executives to claim that Microsoft invited Google to be involved in the CPTN purchase of Novell’s patents. However, Google explained that joining CPTN might have decreased its ability to defend itself against potential patent claims.

# Actuate announced its Q2 …

On many of our clients, we have a need to run XtraBackup as a regular OS user. Aside from running into the issue where tar4ibd was not provided with Percona’s xtrabackup-1.6.2.tar.gz package, our main issues have been with permissions when attempting a streaming backup.

I have found the following:

1. The user needs permissions for a temp directory to stream to/from. The my.cnf of the target database cannot be used because the user does not have permission to write to /tmp/mysql-stdout, so we set a tmpdir in a separate defaults-file.
2. A backup target directory must be used that the user has read/write permissions to. It seems to me a target directory should not be needed for a streaming backup, …

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 …

OSCON is coming up again: July 25th-29th in wonderful Portland, OR. If you come to OSCON, not only will you be at OSCON, but you’ll be in Portland in July – which is just lovely. We’ll also have other people from Percona there and it should be a great lot of fun.

So come along and talk interesting technology – I’ll be speaking on “Dropping ACID: Eating Data in a Web 2.0 Cloud World“. If you know my love of reliable software with known failure modes, you’ll probably enjoy this one – especially if you saw my “Eat My Data: How everybody gets POSIX file I/O Wrong” which when given at OSCON 2008 was given to a packed room with people in the aisles and out the door.

Speaking has its pluses and minuses of course. It takes a very, very …

In December I covered the topic The state of MySQL forks: co-operating without co-operating (which was also a response to Giuseppe Maxia's take on the same topic). Since half a year has now passed, I was wondering if I should follow up with an update. (Drizzle having a GA release would be the major news in such an update.)

But I see that Peter Zaitsev covered this topic in the opening keynote of their Percona Live conference. Since I agree with Peter's view on this topic, I just recommend you watch the talk on Percona.TV. He also uses the same categorizations of the forks, and includes "community patches" as its separate …