Good news everyone! I recently presented a webinar: Percona Server 5.6: Enterprise Grade MySQL. It was also recorded so you can watch along or view the slide deck. As with all my talks, I am not simply reading the slides so it really is worth to listen to the audio rather than just glance through the slide deck.

There were a number of great questions asked which I’ll answer below:

Q: How does Stewart feel about this version of 5.6 taking into consideration “Stewart’s .20 rule?” (ref 2013 Percona Live Conference).

A: For those who aren’t familiar with it, I have a rule which I call “Stewart’s dot twenty rule” which I’ve posted a few times about on my personal blog. It …

Thanks to all who attended my “MySQL Query Tuning” webinar on July 24.  If you missed it, you can you can download the slides and also watch the recorded video. Thank you for the excellent questions after the webinar as well. Query tuning is a big topic and, due to the limited time, I had to skip some material, especially some of the monitoring. I would like, however, to answer all the questions I did not get into during the webinar session.

Q: Did you reset the query cache before doing your benchmark on your query? 0.00 seconds sounds too good 

A: (This is in response to a …

The new Percona Server 5.6 is the most manageable, highest performance, and most scalable version of MySQL available. Percona Server 5.6 is the best open source MySQL choice for enterprise-grade applications because it combines new features with the best features of Percona Server 5.5 and MySQL 5.6 to provide unparalleled performance.

Join me tomorrow as I explain how Percona Server 5.6 takes MySQL performance to new heights. In this webinar, aptly titled “Percona Server 5.6: Enterprise Grade MySQL,” I’ll compare Percona Server 5.6 to …

On July 24 at 10 a.m. PDT, I will be delivering a Webinar on Advanced MySQL Query Tuning. I will focus on optimizing the common slow queries with group by and order by. Those queries usually create temporary tables and perform a “filesort” operation. I will show how to optimize those queries so that they will be running significantly faster, which will increase the application performance and decrease MySQL load.

I presented a similar topic in April at the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo 2013. This webinar, however, will be more advanced and will also cover some additional topics like “loose and …

Failure is an unavoidable part of IT life, but it does not always have to imply MySQL service downtime. In the years I have been working at Percona, I have been involved in many customer emergency cases, and I have seen a good number of problems that could have been avoided or alleviated if relatively simple proactive measures were taken.

On July 17th 2013, at 10 a.m. PDT, I will be delivering a webinar focused on presenting the Top 5 such measures, with the objective of helping you assess your current situation, and implement any needed changes to avoid production downtime in the future. The webinar is titled: “5 Proactive Measures to Minimize MySQL Downtime.”

Later that day, I will be delivering the …

Thanks to all who attended my PXC Operations webinar last week.  If you missed it you can watch the video here.

I wanted to take some time to answer the questions I didn’t get to during the broadcast.

Is there an easy way to leverage the xtrabackup SST and IST in an xtradb cluster to take your full and incremental backups of the cluster’s databases?

An SST is a full backup of one of the nodes in your database already.  If you want another backup, you may as well just run xtrabackup yourself (though don’t forget the discussion about locking from the talk).

IST is not affected by wsrep_sst_method …

Thanks to everyone who was in attendance on 05 June 2013 for my “Choosing a MySQL HA Solution” webinar. If you weren’t able to make it but are interested in listening to the presentation, it’s currently up and available for viewing over at percona.com.

My apologies if we weren’t able to get to your question during the initial session, so I’ll address those lingering questions in this post, along with providing a bit more detail on some of the questions that I did cover during the session.

Q: What is the reason that I recommended DRBD be used only on physical hardware and not on virtual machines?
A: I covered this a bit during the session, but to provide a bit more commentary. There …

On Friday I gave a presentation on “MySQL Query Patterns, Optimized” for Percona MySQL Webinars.  If you missed it, you can still register to view the recording and my slides.

Thanks to everyone who attended, and especially to folks who asked the great questions.  I answered as many as we had time for  during the session, but here are all the questions with my complete answers:

Q: Can you compare the use of subqueries/multiple joins vs. multiple queries (e.g. temp tables)?

For performance, it’s hard to make …

Selecting the most appropriate solution for a MySQL HA infrastructure is as much a business and philosophical decision as it is a technical one, but often the choice is made without adequately considering all three perspectives.  When too much attention is paid to one of these aspects at the cost of the others, the resulting system may be over-engineered, poorly-performing, and/or various other flavors of suboptimal.

On Wednesday, June 5, at 10 a.m. PDT (1700 UTC), I will be presenting a webinar entitled, Choosing a MySQL HA Solution, in which we’ll explore the topic of MySQL HA from each of these perspectives.  The goal will be to motivate your thinking about HA in a holistic fashion and help …

Next Friday, May 31 at 10 a.m. Pacific, I’ll present Percona’s next webinar, “SQL Query Patterns, Optimized.”

Based on my experiences solving tough SQL problems for Percona training and consulting, I’ll classify several common types of queries with which developers struggle. I’ll test several SQL solutions for each type of query objective, and show how you can use MySQL 5.6 built-in methods to analyze them for optimal query efficiency.  The discussion will cover optimizer reports, query profiling, and session status to measure performance.

The query patterns will …