On Oct. 25th I will be presenting my conference session “Keep your MySQL backend online no matter what” at the Percona Live London Conference. Considering their is a variety of highly knowledgeable MySQL experts speaking at this event I wanted to give my talk a special plug so you won’t miss THIS knowledgeable MySQL expert speak!

My talk focuses on architecture that will help keep your MySQL backends online when you simply can’t afford them to go down. This is not about one single solution, but a combination of different technologies working together. This architecture is built on MMM, HeartBeat, LVS, ldirectord and some custom scripts. As a real world example I will demonstrate how this solution was applied for a payment processor website behind an alexa top50 website, where data consistency was important. In addition I will show an example for another alexa top 500 website, where downtime and customer satisfactory was the numer 1 …

I’m going to be speaking on Highload++ conference October 3,4 in Moscow, Russia. This is a great conference which gathers amazing quality of speakers from Russia and around the world and I usually learn a lot and enjoy talking to a lot of great people on this event.

My talk is going to be about new developments in MySQL Server 5.5, 5.6, Percona Server, MariaDB and Drizzle as it relates to high volume/large scale projects. There is a lot of really cool things happening in MySQL space recently and I would love to share those with you.

I’m also doing a training session 5th of October, which will be in depth training session based on Percona’s Training for MySQL Developers. In fact this is a great learning …

It’s Friday again (already?) and as usual, we have a free ticket for Percona Live London. This time Tokutek is doing the honors of running the contest and selecting the winner. Instructions for entering the contest are on their blog, at the top of my recent guest post about covering indexes.

This week’s TGIF give-away contest is a day early, and it’s a guest post over on the Engine Yard blog: 5 subtle ways you’re using MySQL as a queue, and why it’ll bite you. Go there to read the full post, and watch @engineyard’s Twitter feed for the chance to enter the contest for free Percona Live London tickets!

Excerpt from the blog post:

Many people realize the difficulties in building a good job queue or batch processing system, and try not to create one inside MySQL. Although the job queue is a great design pattern from the developer’s point of view, they know it’s often hard to implement well in a relational database. However, experience shows me that job queues sneak up in unexpected ways, even if you’re a seasoned …

It’s Friday again (so soon!) and time for our TGIF contest, to give away a free ticket to Percona Live London. Before we do that, though, just what in the world does this output from SHOW INNODB STATUS mean?

Mutex spin waits 5870888, rounds 19812448, OS waits 375285

To understand this text, you have to understand how InnoDB handles mutexes. It tries a two-step approach to getting a lock on a mutex. First, a thread tries to lock the mutex. If the mutex is locked by someone else, then the thread does a so-called spin wait. This means that it repeatedly checks “are you free? are you free? are you free?” in a loop. If this doesn’t work after a while, it gives up and goes to sleep until the mutex is free. I’m simplifying this a lot, perhaps too much, but it’s a topic that would take a long blog post to explain correctly in detail. The related source …

For those that missed it – we added training in Sydney to our website.

We’ve booked a training venue near the Museum of Contemporary Art (200 George Street). Some minor logistical changes:

• The start time will now be 9am to 5pm

We look forward to seeing you there!

It’s Friday again, and time for another TGIF give-away of a Percona Live London ticket! But first, what’s new with the MySQL query cache? You may know that it still has the same fundamental architecture that it’s always had, and that this can cause scalability problems and locking, but there have been some important changes recently. Let’s take a look at those.

The first important change is that both Percona and Oracle actually built some code improvements into the query cache and the interface between it and MySQL. It’s now possible to completely disable it, for example. This used to be possible only by eliminating it at compile time. If you didn’t do that, then there was still a query-cache single choke-point in the server. Now that’s gone. As of MySQL 5.5, the query cache mutex isn’t hit at all if …

We have a great line up of Tutorials on Percona Live, London. I hand picked number of them after seeing outstanding speaker Performance in other Places. Let me tell in little bit more details about people we have invited and their talks.

Yoshinori Matsunobu Talk on Linux Hardware and Optimizations for MySQL at Oreilly MySQL Conference and Expo was phenomenal. I wrote about it before and I’m very happy Yoshinori is able to come to London and talk more about this topic. Yoshinori put probably months of testing and research in his talk …

We’re thrilled to announce that we have signed a contract with the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara and the Santa Clara Convention Center, to host a Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo on April 10-12, 2012. This event is part of our Percona Live series of conferences, but it’s not just another event in the series.

We all know that the entire MySQL community has been waiting to see if there will be a MySQL conference next year in the traditional date and location. To the best of our knowledge, no one else was planning one, so we decided to keep the tradition …

The first two Percona Live MySQL conferences in San Francisco and New York were sold-to-capacity events with the bonus of great evening parties. Percona Live’s huge popularity convinced us to take the conference series on the road to London, England. We also decided to broaden learning, content, networking, presentation and marketing opportunities for attendees and sponsors by extending it to two days!

Percona Live London takes place October 24-25. We will have one day of tutorials and one day of sessions, and we added exhibit space for sponsors. Percona Live London tickets are offered at a discounted early-bird registration rate until Sept 19th, for those who want to save money. (You do like saving money, right?)

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