I just realized that we haven’t blogged a list of our sessions at the O’Reilly MySQL Conference and Expo (#mysqlconf) yet. Here is a hopefully complete list.

• Diagnosing and Fixing MySQL Performance Problems (Monday Tutorial)
• Percona Server: secret features
• MySQL and SSD: Usage Patterns
• Achieving PCI Compliance with MySQL
• The …

Want a free pass to the O’Reilly MySQL Conference next week in Santa Clara, California? It’s the MySQL conference, and the session lineup is awesome this year. We’ve got several free passes to give away. Post a comment here to claim your spot. First come, first served! (But make sure you are serious about committing to go — it would not be nice to claim a ticket and deny someone else the chance to go.)

Update Thanks everyone who commented! I think we have enough hats in the ring now… let me iron out the details, but I think all the tickets are claimed. Everyone who didn’t win — if we get another ticket, we’ll contact you, in order. And of course, remember that the expo hall passes are dirt cheap and you can come see us there, in booth #312! There’s a 20% discount code here: …

I’ll be giving a 40-50 minute long webinar on 26th of April on data recovery for MySQL.

Almost every long serving DBA has been faced with the task of recovering data from a database, whether it be via user error such as a erroneously dropped table or from Hardware or Software failure. In this Webinar we will give you a walk through guide on how to restore your data after physical or logical failure, using practical examples to demonstrate how to tackle this challenging problem. Attendance is free.

What you can learn by attending:

* Prepare for recovery (prerequisites)
* Preparing your data
* Identifying the structure and state of tables
* Retrieving data
* Restoring from recovered data

During this Webinar the Percona-InnoDB-Recovery-Tool will be used on Linux.

To register:
…

Many of the prominent companies in the MySQL ecosystem are Percona customers, including hardware manufacturers, software developers, hosted service providers, and appliance developers. We perform paid and unpaid research on their products, and we publish blog posts related to their products or services. Independence and objectivity are core Percona values. How do we balance the interests of all involved while maintaining our vendor-neutral stance? This is a very important topic for all of our current and potential customers to understand. It is essential that we set realistic expectations about how we’ll work with you, so that we don’t enter into a business relationship based on assumptions that could cause conflict.

The short version of the following lengthy blog post is that vendors can buy Percona’s time, but not our opinion or the use of our name.

We can separate customers into two main groups of interest for this blog …

On March 29th, I’ll be giving a webinar whose title is “Understanding HandlerSocket – A NoSQL PlugIn For MySQL”. This is a continuation and extension of the talk I gave during the Percona Live Event in San Francisco back in February. We’ll ask, and answer, the following questions:

• What is HandlerSocket?
• Where does HandlerSocket fit in my application stack?
• Why would I want to use HandlerSocket?
• How do I use Handlersocket?

Description:

http://www.percona.com/webinars/2011-03-29-understanding-handlersocket-a-nosql-plugIn-for-mysql/

To register:

…

What’s new this week in Percona Server:

• For users who upgraded to Squeeze, the new version of Debian, we’re expecting to support Squeeze in our repositories on the next release based on MySQL 5.1.55, which we estimate will be released on March 9th. This should also update the Maverick repository for Ubuntu users.
• If you’re waiting for the innodb_lazy_drop_table feature in Percona Server, unfortunately it doesn’t look like we can get it into the next release. It was just too late in the release process to have time to do proper QA, and we take quality very seriously.
• Yasufumi clarified his idea for XtraDB to store statistics for the ::records_in_range() handler function, instead of accessing the data. This would prevent queries from needing to enter the InnoDB kernel during the planning phase, which can be a severe bottleneck especially for complex queries, which need to check the number of records in …

We have a special Friends of Percona discount code that you can use to get 20% off of registration at the MySQL conference in April: mys11pkb. If you click the image to the left, or this special link, it will pre-fill the code for you when you check out. Read on to see the list of sessions we’re presenting at the conference.

I really hope you are able to make it to this event. The value of attending conferences, for your company and your career, is hard to overstate. For me personally, attending the MySQL conference was a big part of what has shaped my career so far. I hope to see you there — you can flag me (and any of us) down in the hallways, eat lunch with us, come see us at our expo hall booth, and above all come …

This week’s announcement is short: last week was pretty much all-hands-on-deck for our first 5.5.8 release. Still, it wasn’t ALL about the new release:

• The beta release of Percona Server 5.5.8 is out! More details in the release notes.
• There are ongoing discussions about parallel replication, as well as customer requests for enhancements to row-based replication (for example, making it work with more types of schema changes on a replica), but there is nothing concrete to announce.
• Yasufumi is working on solving the problem with slow DROP TABLE performance in InnoDB.
• There is a lot of work on packaging and build improvements, including some packaging improvements such as providing various dependencies better in Ubuntu.
• A lot of new test cases! Our QA engineer Valentine …

Percona Live is in only two days away – and we’ve managed to completely sell out (something I predicted earlier).  Before I go into details, I want to thank three sponsors who have been absolutely awesome:

Clustrix is providing an open bar all evening, New Relic is providing all attendees with lunch and Fusion-io is providing Amici’s pizza for the evening.  When signing up, we mentioned in our FAQ that food would not be provided, and I am happy to say that with our sponsors this will no longer be the case. The details I wanted to share:

• Registration is closed.  We’re sorry, we will be turning away …

This is a cross-posting of an article we wrote for Engine Yard: Rails makes database interaction so simple that it’s easy to forget that the database isn’t always happy with what Rails does to it. Here are three leading mistakes that hurt many Rails applications. » Read the rest at Engine Yard’s blog.

While you’re there, be sure to follow Engine Yard’s Twitter feed for a chance to win a ticket to the sold-out Percona Live conference.