Today, we are announcing that we're ready to offer training for InnoDB and XtraDB in Santa Clara and San Francisco.  The course was developed by Morgan Tocker with input from all our team - and covers a lot of the performance problems we run through in our consulting practice.

The Details:

14th Sept - Santa Clara
1 day intensive course
Cost: $300*

16th Sept - San Francisco
1 day intensive course
Cost: $300*

(* includes a copy of High Performance MySQL if you register before 31st Aug).

The delivery format:

Being only one day, we elected to deliver the course in a predominately lecture-format - but there will be a few opportunities to try examples.  For more information see the …

Microsoft contributes to Linux. Acquia raises $8m. And more.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory on Twitter and Identi.ca
“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

Microsoft contributes to Linux
Microsoft announced that it is to contribute device driver code to the Linux kernel under the GPLv2. Prompting us to publish a CAOS Theory Q&A. Answering one questioning we failed to ask, ZDnet reported that Microsoft’s Linux contributions should find their way into the 2.6.32 release.

Acquia raises $8m
Mass High Tech …

The Percona team has kept on expanding. We are very pleased to announce the addition of Morgan Tocker and Matt Yonkovit!

Morgan has been with us for a while. Before joining Percona, Morgan worked as a Technical Instructor for MySQL (and then Sun Microsystems) in Canada where he taught courses on High Availability, Performance Tuning and Database …

At Percona we provide services both Onsite - visiting the customers and Remote - logging in to their systems or communicating via email,phone,instant messaging.

We believe both approaches have their benefits and drawbacks and mixing them right way allows you to get your problems solved most efficient way.

Onsite visits are great as they allow consultant to meet your team in person and great for relationship building. It is great for architecture design and review as you can sit down with the team and use drawing board. It also often allows the best focus both for consultant and for participating team - when consulting visit is arranged it is usually the top priority for some of the staff members which provide consultant with information and assistance he might need.

Onsite visits also often allow to get prompt attention from other team - looking for …

Following the launch of the Open Database Alliance a number of interesting reports were published that examined its role in establishing MariaDB as an alternative development branch for MySQL and as a vendor-neutral open source database collective.

I had a few questions myself, which Monty Widenius and Peter Zaitsev, CEO of Percona, were good enough to answer for me via email. They also agreed for the exchange to be published here. This is what they had to say:

Q: Monty has stated that the intention is to open up the Alliance to include other open source database projects - any indication of how this would be done given the diverse …

Following the launch of the Open Database Alliance some people have assumed that it is only a matter of time before MariaDB becomes the de facto replacement for MySQL.

That assumes that Oracle will allow the development of MySQL to stagnate, either deliberately or through neglect - something that we have expressed our doubts about, but even if that were the case it appears that the GPL (or more to the point MySQL’s dual licensing strategy) may restrict the potential for MariaDB.

Curt Monash recently raised the question of whether closed-source storage engines can be used with MySQL (and, by …

Open Database Alliance formed. Oracle buys Virtual Iron. AccesStream reaches version 1.0. And more.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory

I’ve just met a fork named Maria
MySQL founder Monty Widenius and Percona CEO Peter Zaitsev announced the launch of the Open Database Alliance - “a collection of companies working together to provide the software, support and services for MariaDB, an enterprise-grade, community-developed branch of MySQL.”

Continuent and Open Query quickly announced their membership, while Monty later …

Having written about what I think is cool about the upcoming MySQL Conference and the MySQL Camp, now I want to finish up with what I’d like to see at the Percona Performance Conference. Just to recap, this is a conference we created to serve those who want to learn about performance — not “learn about MySQL,” not “learn about database performance,” just learn about performance, period.

I want to see everything. I think this is going to be the single best conference I’ve ever been to. Even the way the conference is organized is exciting. For example, it’s running from early morning till late at night, nonstop. The sessions are also (mostly) only 25 minutes. This means if you decide a session isn’t all that interesting, you didn’t spend much time on it, and you don’t have long to wait for the next one.

So here is a small sample of the …

Today we glad to announce release 1.0.3-4 of our XtraDB storage engine.

Here is a list of enhancements in this release:

• Move to MySQL 5.1.33
• Move to InnoDB plugin 1.0.3
• more reliable replication, innodb_overwrite_relay_log_info patch now included in the release
• fix assertions for …

I've started using Xtrabackup to backup MySQL on my MacBook. Here's an example of a quick backup and restore:

1. Download the latest .tar.gz from Percona:

$ cd /tmp
$ wget http://www.percona.com/mysql/xtrabackup/0.5/xtrabackup-0.5-macos.x86_64.tar.gz
$ tar -xzf xtrabackup-*-macos.x86_64.tar.gz
$ cd xtrabackup*

2. This directory should contain innobackupex-1.5.1 and xtrabackup. You need to install these into a directory that appears in your $PATH. In my case, I am going to group it install it where my MySQL binaries are located (/usr/local/mysql/bin):

$ ls
innobackupex-1.5.1 xtrabackup
$ cp * /usr/local/mysql/bin/

3. Create a directory where you want your backup to go. In …