When I sent a proposal for session "Managing and Troubleshooting MySQL for Oracle DBAs" to MySQL Connect conference org committee it had not any mention of Oracle in its name, but later I was asked to provide more details for former Oracle DBAs who want to use MySQL. I was fast and I said "yes".

So my original aim to teach people to troubleshoot MySQL changed to teaching of how different is MySQL from Oracle in troubleshooting aspects. Although both RDBMs have very much in common they are definitely very different. So what I am going to speak about this time is nuances of how MySQL stores data, how it manages locks, why its high availability solutions: MySQL Cluster and Replication have same names as Oracle's, but work differently and more. And, of …

Sheeri K. Cabral at the Mozilla Foundation wrote about an issue with the June 30th 2012 leap second affecting at least MySQL, Java and Minecraft servers. It now appears that the underlying cause is a Linux kernel bug, as noted by John Stultz (IBM) on the Linux Kernel mailing list, and the team Sheeri is part of deserves due credit for doing awesome pattern recognition and being the first to bring it to public attention, enabling people to quickly correlate their own experience with that of others and finding a practical solution as well as helping figure out the cause.

Sheeri’s original post MySQL and the Leap Second, High CPU and the Fix describes how MySQL servers would suddenly exhibit high CPU usage during a period of low load. …

It is the day after the conference ended and I feel great. Two days of percona live and a day of skysql, drizzle and sphynx presentations were just awesome. I can say that IMHO it is one of the best MySQL conferences since I started attending four years ago. Well done Percona.

There were some great tracks by very very smart people and I have started compiling my list of things to build/setup to make my own deployment better, faster and easier to manage. Full track list can be found: http://www.percona.com/live/mysql-conference-2012/

I should also thank SkySQL and MariaDB for the free days of sessions I attended yesterday, organized and delivered by these two community focussed companies.

Previously, I’ve called out years for non-desktop Linux in 2008, Linux in both the low and high-ends of the market in 2009, ‘hidden’ Linux in 2010 and last year, cloud computing in 2011. For 2012, I see continued growth, prevalence, innovation and impact from Linux, thus leading to a 2012 that is dominated by Linux.

I expect to see nothing but continued strength for Linux and …