A week ago we launched our first GA release of Percona Server 5.6 and it’s a real game-changer for us. The release of Percona Server 5.6 (our enhanced, drop-in replacement for MySQL) not only provides stability and performance but also provides key features only available in Oracle’s MySQL 5.6 Enterprise Edition. As usual, Percona Server 5.6 is 100 percent Free and Open Source Software.

On Oct. 16 I’ll lead a webinar that will present what’s new in Percona Server 5.6 that makes it the most powerful, highest performance, and most manageable free version of MySQL available today. The one-hour webinar starts at 1 p.m. Pacific time Wednesday. You can register here. …

We had a wonderful time during the Sept. 25 webinar, “MySQL 5.6 Configuration Optimization,” and I got a lot more questions than I could answer during the hour. So here is a followup with answers to the most interesting questions you guys asked. (You can also watch a recording of entire webinar here.)

Q: What is the impact of having innodb_stats_on_metadata=off in terms of seeing actual table size in information schema ?

A: In MySQL 5.6 this option if off by default. If you disable it in earlier version you will still see the actual table and index sizes as …

MySQL DBAs know that integrating MySQL and a big data solution can be challenging. That’s why I invite you to join me this Wednesday (Oct. 2) at 10 a.m. Pacific time for a free webinar in which I’ll walk you through how to implement a successful big data strategy with Apache Hadoop and MySQL. This webinar is specifically tailored for MySQL DBAs and developers (or any person with a previous MySQL experience) who wants to know about how to use Apache Hadoop together with MySQL for Big Data.

The webinar is titled, “Implementing MySQL and Hadoop for Big Data,” and you can register here.

Storing Big Data in MySQL alone can be challenging:

• Single MySQL instance may not …

This Wednesday in our next webinar I’ll share how to configure a better-performing MySQL 5.6 server. You’ll lean a practical approach to generating a sensible configuration file that sets what is needed and omits what is not.

Why dedicate an entire webinar to the new configuration settings within MySQL 5.6? Mainly because the default configuration files that come with MySQL 5.6 are not designed for high volume production use, and I’ve seen many MySQL incidents caused by poor configuration. Hopefully my advice will save you the headache of tweaking the variables within MySQL’s configuration files in order to work within your organization’s unique business environment.

And while I’ll be …

Join me Wednesday, September 18 at 10 a.m. PDT for an hour-long webinar where I will introduce the basic concepts behind column store technology. The webinar’s title is: “Introduction to open source column stores.”

What will be discussed?

This webinar will talk about Infobright, LucidDB, MonetDB, Hadoop (Impala) and other column stores

• I will compare features between major column stores (both open and closed source).
• Some benchmarks will be used to demonstrate the basic performance characteristics of the open source column stores.
• There will be a question and answer session to ask me anything you like about column stores (you can also ask in the …

Thanks to everyone who attended last week’s webinar, Running MySQL 5.6 on Amazon RDS.” If you weren’t able to attend, the recording and slides are available for viewing/download (or, if you were able to attend and just want to see it again). I’ve also answered the questions I didn’t have a chance to field during the event:

Q: Would you recommend Amazon RDS over manually setting up MySQL/Percona server on an EC2 instance?
A: This depends on many factors including your data set size, workload, uptime requirements, what the rest of your stack looks like, and many other factors.

Q: At Q&A time, can you go more into 5.6 InnoDB full text search vs the Amazon search offering? …

Thanks to everyone who attended last week’s webinar on MySQL security; hopefully you’ve all gone out and set SELinux to enforcing mode if you weren’t already running that way. If you weren’t able to attend, the recording and slides are available for viewing/download. But now, without further ado, here are the questions which we didn’t have time to cover during the presentation.

Q: Do you have a favorite software firewall you recommend that I can run on an EC2 instance in front of my MySQL server?
A: I’d probably just do this with iptables. Any of the other Linux-based software firewall packages are all going to be wrappers around iptables anyway. However, if …

One longstanding complaint I have heard for the past several years, and still hear today, is that Amazon’s Relational Database Service (RDS) does not allow the configuration flexibility as running MySQL in an ec2 instance. While true, this ignores the consistent work that Amazon has done to provide access to the most important configuration variables needed to tune a MySQL instance (after all, how relevant is it for a customer to set bind_address in an RDS instance).

Let’s take a look visually:

MySQL provides 523 options (35 of them NDB specific, so aren’t relevant to RDS), while RDS provides (via the web UI) …

My colleague and teammate Ernie Souhrada will be presenting a webinar on Wednesday, August 21, 2013 at 10 a.m. PDT titled “MySQL Security: Armoring Your Dolphin.”

This is a popular topic with news breaking routinely that yet another Internet company has leaked private data of one form or another. Ernie’s webinar will be a great overview of security MySQL from top to bottom, including changes related to security in the 5.6 release.

Topics to be covered include:

• Basic …

I’m happy to announce that the recording for my recent webinar “5 Proactive Measures to Minimize MySQL Downtime” is now available, along with the slides. They can both be found here.

My webinar focused on the top 5 operational measures that prevent or reduce downtime — along with the related business impact in a significant number of customer emergency scenarios.

As a senior consultant on Percona’s 24×7 Emergency Consulting team, I’ve helped resolve a …