I have one free ticket to give away to RailsConf next week in Baltimore! Post a comment to win, and if you aren’t the winner, I’ll give you a discount code for Percona Live as a consolation prize.

Here’s the catch: you have to find at least one thing wrong with the following typical logrotate configuration for MySQL. This should be easy even if you’re not a MySQL expert

# This logname can be set in /etc/my.cnf
# by setting the variable "err-log"
# in the [safe_mysqld] section as follows:
#
# [safe_mysqld]
# err-log=/var/lib/mysql/mysqld.log
#
# If the root user has a password you have to create a
# /root/.my.cnf configuration file with the following
# content:
#
# [mysqladmin]
# password = <secret>
# user= root
#
# where "<secret>" is the password.
#
# ATTENTION: This /root/.my.cnf should be readable ONLY …

We have mostly finalized the Percona Live schedule at this point, and I thought I’d take a few minutes to introduce who’s going to be speaking and what they’ll cover. A brief explanation first: we’ve personally recruited the speakers, which is why it has been a slow process to finalize and get abstracts on the web. Sometimes you know someone’s a dynamite speaker and you discuss over the phone, and then it takes a long time to get a title and abstract from them. In many cases the better they are the busier they are, so this is expected.

Let me introduce just a few of the great speakers we have lined up for this event: Brendan Gregg, Dr. John Busch, and Vladimir Fedorkov.

Brendan Gregg

Brendan Gregg is the crazy guy who likes to scream at a chassis …

Percona is sponsoring RailsConf again this year, and we’ll be at booth #110 in the expo hall. Use our discount code to save 20% off the ticket price: rc11mysql. We hope to see you there! (Sadly, we didn’t get any sessions accepted this year, so we won’t be speaking. Maybe next year.)

We’ve given discount coupon codes to all of our Percona Live sponsors, so watch the Twitter tag #perconalive to find discount announcements. Here’s the list of sponsoring organizations: Clustrix Vork Continuent Fusion-io Infobright Pentaho Schooner Information Technology SkySQL Virident …

We’ve just rented more rooms, and published an additional two tracks of speakers for Percona Live in New York on May 26th. The schedule is here. There is a long queue of speaker submissions we’re finalizing and will be adding to the schedule, to fill the few empty slots in those new rooms.

My favorite not-yet-confirmed session is from a company who has built their business in the Amazon cloud, and has seen just about every angle of running a large database in the cloud. This isn’t an extraordinary database, all things considered — as they told me, “it’s not a science fiction use case. It’s just science fiction to run it in the cloud.” That is precisely why this is such an interesting story to hear. There is a lot of wisdom to be gleaned from people who’ve done such things.

Tickets are selling fast, and we still expect to …

We see demand on MacOS binaries and decided to prepare binaries you can download and use. The are marked as “experimental”, as we do not have big history of using MacOS in production, so we are looking for your feedback and bug reports.

Binaries:

• Percona Server 5.5 : http://www.percona.com/downloads/TESTING/Percona-Server-55/Percona-Server-5.5.11-20.2/release-5.5.11-20.2/114/MacOSX/
• Percona Server 5.1: http://www.percona.com/downloads/TESTING/Percona-Server-51/Percona-Server-5.1.56-12.7/release-5.1.56-12.7/226/MacOSX/
• Percona XtraBackup: …

Just few short hours remain for Early Bird Discount for Percona Live, New York City. This is your last chance to grab the ticket at almost 50% discount, for $129 instead of $259. We have a Great Session Lineup and outstanding networking opportunities !

Harrison Fisk, from the Facebook database team, will be in New York City delivering the closing keynote at Percona Live next month. He’ll be talking about the present status and future plans for MySQL inside Facebook’s environment. As you probably know, Facebook is one of the largest users of MySQL, with their own set of patches, and the Facebook team is very open about how they use MySQL and what their challenges are. This is a great chance to hear from Harrison in person and ask questions — and we have a great lineup of other speakers, too. Check out the list of sessions for more information.

The early-bird discount ticket pricing ends in a few days, so go ahead and …

The first Percona Live conference in San Francisco in February was a huge success, and we’re planning to run several each year. The next one is May 26th in New York City. We’ve just confirmed a number of sought-after speakers and posted the schedule online. We are in the process of confirming sessions from a number of other top industry experts now. The early-bird special pricing is in effect for another week or so — don’t delay! And if you’re interested in sponsoring the show, act now — the deadline for many of the best opportunities is only a week away.

Percona, and Yasufumi Kinoshita who works for Percona, received two awards from the O’Reilly MySQL Conference co-chairs on behalf of the committee that voted on the nominees. The awards were: to Yasufumi as O’Reilly MySQL Community Contributor of the Year 2011 for InnoDB performance improvements, and to XtraBackup as O’Reilly MySQL Application of the Year 2011 for adding opensource hot backup functionality to MySQL.

It’s worth saying that XtraBackup is a team effort: Yasufumi wrote the initial version of XtraBackup, and Alexey Kopytov has been working on it recently. Our congratulations to all of the winners: Yasufumi, Giuseppe Maxia, Continuent, and DeNA. Let’s keep making MySQL better!

(Note: I was part of the conference speaker committee, but not part of the award committee. I’m not sure who was …