I’m speaking at Percona Live MySQL Conference & Expo 2012. My two talk are: Getting Started with Drizzle 7.1 and Verifying MySQL Replication Safely With pt-table-checksum 2.0. No, there’s no relationship between those topics; they’re just things I know well.

I’ve been stalking Drizzle for many years. When it went GA last year, I began hacking Drizzle, focusing on plugins which give it nearly all its functionality. Recently, I helped overhaul the configuration, administration, and plugin …

Selena and I gave a talk on the various issues of running databases “in the cloud” at the recent linux.conf.au in Ballarat. Video is up, embedded below:

In my previous post I explained why I believe the production of RPM and DEB packages should be more integrated with the rest of your development process. Now it's time to look into how you can put the RPM build scripts inside your main source code repository, and in particular how I did that to produce RPM packages for Drizzle.

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Last weekend I released rpm files for the latest Drizzle Fremont beta (announcement). As part of that work I've also integrated the spec file and other files used by the rpmbuild into the main Drizzle bzr repository (but not yet merged into trunk). In this post I want to explain why I think this is a good thing, and in a follow up post I'll go into what I needed to do to make it work.

(And speaking of stuff you can download, phpMyAdmin 3.5.0-alpha1 now supports Drizzle!)

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In 2008 my career took a sudden unexpected turn into the world of MySQL when I was offered a job at Sun.  Since then MySQL and it's forks have been a big part of my life.  The whole community (I mean the people, not the companies) around MySQL are part of what really drove me.

Unfortunately to me something has changed.  I am not exactly sure what it is, but I am sure it is not just me because others have expressed it in conversation too.  I wasn't enjoying things as much as I used to and for several reasons, some related to this, I have been quite ill.

Recently I was approached by HP's new cloud division who wanted me to work on OpenStack.  It seemed the perfect opportunity to start something new inside a new vibrant community.  That is not to say I have anything against my previous …

First of all, I wish you a happy new year.
Many things happened last year, it was really exciting to be involved in the MySQL ecosystem.
I hope this enthusiasm will be increased this year, up to you !

To start the year, I propose the MySQL[plus] Awards 2011
It will only take 5 minutes to fill out these polls.
Answer with your heart first and then with your experience with some of these tools or services.

Polls will be closed January 31, so, vote now !
For “other” answers, please,  let me a comment with details.

Don’t hesitate to submit proposal for tools or services in the comments.
And, please, share these polls !

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, …

One of the best things that can happen to a piece of software is for people to actually use it.

I’ve been fortunate enough to have received feedback on the tool from several members of both the Percona and Drizzle teams.  The most common and strongly emphasized comments were in regards to what a terrible, terrible name dbqp really is in terms of saying, seeing, and typing it ; )

As that isn’t something that can be disputed (it’s really annoying to use in conversations *and* to type several dozen times a day), the project has been renamed to kewpie.  For those that follow such things, I did present on …

A year ago I posted a blog on The state of MySQL forks: co-operating without co-operating. (Also Giuseppe wrote about the topic at that time, and Peter Zaitsev covers it in his conference keynotes.) So I've been wondering if it would be good to write an update on the topic now, and in that case what to write.

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There's now 2 weeks left of the Call for Papers for Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo (Santa Clara, CA). This weekend I've been finalizing my abstracts for submission and I trust many of you are doing the same. (If nothing else, do it for the free entrance! Or because you're passionate about MySQL, yeah, that's what I meant...)

This is the main annual MySQL event, so I thought it is worth the bandwidth to use these two weeks for some discussion and brainstorming. We are the MySQL community, it's up to us to make this a great conference now! This year I'm on the program committee, so I'm looking forward to reviewing many, many great proposals. At the same time, I'm interested to hear what you, dear readers - and hopefully future conference visitors - are interested in seeing at the conference? I'll share my ideas here and you can share yours in the comments …

The MySQL documentation impresses me. I can’t recall a time when I didn’t find what I was looking for or that its details were lacking. Documenting a database server is difficult; the amount of information to organize and communicate clearly is staggering. I tasted that challenge when I helped update the Drizzle documentation, which was recently updated online.

I think Drizzle will become be a serious alternative or compliment to MySQL. Imho, Drizzle was until now held back by its documentation, or lack thereof, which created an insurmountable stumbling block for even clever DBAs. For example, Drizzle is largely comprised of plugins, but none of those plugins were documented until now.

I use the MySQL documentation as a goal, that to which the Drizzle documentation strives, not necessarily in style but in completeness. …