So, after a whirlwind few days, Percona Live 2018 has been and gone. There was a great energy about the conference, and it was fantastic to meet so many open source database enthusiasts and supporters. A few things that I experienced:

• Your great willingness to share knowledge. It was a fantastic place to learn for those who have experience from a different field of technology. Almost everyone seemed to be very open and generous with their time.
• The “superstars” from our industry are not so scary. They are as willing to be open and generous with their experience and views as any of the other attendees, and equally as interested in making new discoveries.
• There aren’t many times you can sit down to a (community) dinner, to share food and anecdotes with people from USA, UK, Germany and Armenia at the same time. I thoroughly enjoyed the company, …

What does Anton Ego – a fictional restaurant critic from the Pixar movie Ratatouille – have to do with MySQL 8.0 GA?

When it comes to being a software critic, a lot.

In many ways, the work of a software critic is easy. We risk very little and thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to read and write.

But what about those who give their many hours of code development, and those who have tested such code before release? How about the many people behind the scenes who brought together packaging, documentation, multiple hours of design, marketing, online resources and more?

And all of that, I might add, is open source! Free for the world to take, copy, adapt and even incorporate in full or in part into their own open development.

It is in exactly that area that the …

It’s hard to believe Percona Live 2018 starts on Monday! We’re looking forward to seeing everyone in Santa Clara next week! Here are some quick highlights to remember:

• In addition to all the amazing sessions and keynotes we’ve announced, we’ll be hosting the MySQL Community Awards and the Lightning Talks on Monday during the Opening Reception.
• We’ve also got a great lineup of demos in the exhibit hall all day Tuesday and Wednesday – be sure to stop by and learn more about open source database products and tools.
• On Monday, we …

Join Percona Chief Evangelist Colin Charles as he covers happenings, gives pointers and provides musings on the open source database community.

SCALE16x is over. Percona had a large showing — both Peter Zaitsev & myself had talks, and the booth in the expo hall saw Rick Golba, Marc Sherwood, and Dave Avery also pop by. The lead scanner suggests we had several hundred conversations — read Dave Avery’s summary. My talk went well, though during Q&A the number of questions I got about MariaDB Server was quite interesting (considering it wasn’t part of my talk!). It is clear people are concerned about compatibility (because I spent close to 45 minutes after my talk answering Q&A outside too).

I got to catch up with …

Join Percona Chief Evangelist Colin Charles as he covers happenings, gives pointers and provides musings on the open source database community.

In case you missed last week’s column, don’t forget to read the fairly lengthy FOSDEM MySQL & Friends DevRoom summary.

From a Percona Live Santa Clara 2018 standpoint, beyond the tutorials getting picked and scheduled, the talks have also been picked and scheduled (so you were very likely getting acceptance emails from the Hubb.me system by Tuesday). The rejections have not gone out yet but will follow soon. I expect the schedule to go live either today (end of week) or early next week. Cheapest tickets end March 4, so …

Please join Percona’s Principal Support Engineer, Sveta Smirnova, as she presents “Basic Internal Troubleshooting Tools for MySQL Server” on Thursday, February 15, 2018, at 10:00 am PST (UTC-8) / 1:00 pm EST (UTC-5).

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MySQL Server has many built-in troubleshooting tools. They are always available and can provide many insights on what is happening internally. Many graphical tools, such as Percona Monitoring and Management …

In this blog post, we’ll introduce how you can look at some experimental Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) features using Percona Labs builds on GitHub.

Note: PerconaLabs and Percona-QA are open source GitHub repositories for unofficial scripts and tools created by Percona staff. While not covered by Percona support or services agreements, these handy utilities can help you save time and effort.

Percona software builds located in the PerconaLabs and Percona-QA repositories are not officially released software, and also aren’t covered by Percona support or services agreements. 

Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) is a free and open-source platform for managing and …

In this blog post, I’ll look into four ways MySQL executes GROUP BY. 

In my previous blog post, we learned that indexes or other means of finding data might not be the most expensive part of query execution. For example, MySQL GROUP BY could potentially be responsible for 90% or more of the query execution time. 

The main complexity when MySQL executes GROUP BY is computing aggregate functions in a GROUP BY statement. How this works is shown in the documentation for UDF Aggregate Functions. As we see, the requirement is that UDF functions get all values that constitute the single group one …

In this blog post, we’ll provide an overview of the new MySQL 8.0 RESOURCE_GROUP feature.

One great new feature introduced in MySQL 8.0 that – from my point of view – requires attention is RESOURCE_GROUP.

Short disclaimer: I want to point out that MySQL 8.0 is not GA yet, so it is possible for the MySQL 8.0 RESOURCE_GROUP implementation to change in features and/or behavior.

I’ve used MySQL Community Server 8.0 RC, and everything mentioned below applies to this MySQL version.

In this post, I will quickly look at this feature and summarize what it’s for, how it makes the DBA’s life a little bit easier and highlight some known limitations.

The MySQL documentation describes it as follows:

“MySQL supports creation and …

Please join Percona’s Principal Support Engineer, Sveta Smirnova, as she presents Troubleshooting MySQL Crashes on January 25, 2018, at 10:00 am PST (UTC -8) / 1:00 pm EST (UTC -5).

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This webinar is for every MySQL user! In this talk, I won’t focus on how to analyze core files, read the source code or set breakpoints. Instead, I will focus on techniques that are available to anyone, even a novice.

Many tutorials, including my own, written based on Roel Van de Paar’s video, suggest how to create and analyze core files created at the time of a crash. While this …