The Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo 2014 is just two months away. I’m very excited about this year’s event which continues our tradition of open technical discussions and inviting all parties to the table.

We have a great amount of technical talks from Oracle – I’m especially excited about future-focused talks shedding some light about what to expect in MySQL 5.7 and beyond. This content is best covered by developers actually designing the system and writing the code. We also have great coverage of MySQL alternatives from Percona and MariaDB. You can view the entire program here.

It is great to see well-rounded coverage of many …

I actually don’t remember exactly whether it was in 2006, 2007 or 2008 — but around that time the MySQL community had one of the greatest MySQL conferences put on by O’Reilly and MySQL. It was a good, stable, predictable time.

Shortly thereafter, the MySQL world saw acquisitions, forks, times of uncertainly, more acquisitions, more forks, rumors (“Oracle is going to kill MySQL and the whole Internet”) and just a lot of drama and politics.

And now, after all this time some 6 or 7 years later, it feels like a MySQL Renaissance. All of the major MySQL players are coming to the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo 2013. I am happy to see Oracle’s engineers coming with talks — and now with a great MySQL 5.6 release — and I have great …

Tumblr has been down for more than 12 hours due to an issue with their database cluster. Here is the comment I left on GigaOm.com

This is the freshest lesson for entrepreneurs and startups:
- Learn to value your data
- Implement a high availability plan
- Plan a disaster recovery strategy

“Tumblr likely has the resources to recover…”

I really hope that holds out true but remember, data is the only irreplaceable asset of an organization. Once it’s gone, it’s gone.

When I was handling the disaster at Fotolog (massive database corruption when our SAN crashed), I couldn’t find any company or consulting firm ready to handle the situation and help with data recovery. It was a miracle that I came across the concept of DUDE (Data …