One of my favorite MySQL tools ever is pt-query-digest. It's the tool you use to generate a report of your slow query log (or some other supported sources), and is similar to for example the Query Analyzer in MySQL Enterprise Monitor. Especially in the kind of job I am, where I often just land out of nowhere on a server at the customer site, and need to quickly get an overview of what is going on, this tool is always the first one I run. I will show some examples below.

5 years of MySQL

People often write a blog post when they reach some nice anniversary since they joined MySQL community. Well, for those old enough it usually means when they joined MySQL AB as employee. For me this was January 2008. Because I didn't remember the month correctly, I haven't blogged anything then, but decided to save it for a better opportunity - now.

TL;DR Starting this week I will be working for 10gen, selling MongoDB to the Nordics. This blog post is really long - even then it doesn't contain the most interesting stories, I'm not sure if they can ever be published. Sorry for the length, but remember you don't need to read all at once. This is my last MySQL post so save some of it for cold winter days!

2008 - Sun acquisition

Below are the slides from my last talk at this Percona Live Worldwide MySQL Conference. The idea for this talk was proposed by my co-presenter Massimo Brignoli and goes back to a debate on this topic that went through the MySQL blogosphere during last Autumn - which in itself was sparked by an outstanding retrospective published about a MySQL failure at Github.

MySQL Community Awards 2013 were announced earlier today at the MySQL Conference & Expo...

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It's time again to award persons, applications and companies in the MySQL Community. This is an annual tradition to highlight and give appreciation to some of the things that make MySQL so great.

The first awards were given out in 2005, and since 2010 the winners have been chosen by a community panel of which myself and Shlomi Noach are the co-secretaries. There has been a public nomination period in January and the final voting is done by a panel who are themselves former winners of the award.

The first category is

MySQL Community Awards: Community Contributor of the Year 2013

The first winner is...

Jeremy Cole

Good morning Percona Live visitors! Attached to this post you can find a spreadsheet (both LibreOffice or Excel, as you prefer) that you can use towards the end of my tutorial. I've also attached the slides so you can download a copy of them.

It is a new year and it's time again to start thinking of all the great people and companies that make the MySQL ecosystem so great. It is time to start thinking of this year's MySQL Community Awards.

Last year we had a record number of winners, eleven goblets were handed out! But behind the scenes things were even more exciting, there were several ties that forced the panel to do extra tie-breaking voting rounds. In one category we even had a 6-way tie! All of this just testifies to how much is happening in the MySQL world nowadays.

Percona Live UK took place this week. It was the second year in a row and once again a great conference. Thank you Percona for bringing the show to Europe, it means a lot for the European MySQL community - many people who don't visit the Santa Clara conference were present in London. It's kind of funny, I even meet more Finnish MySQL users in London than I do at home!

I gave 2 talks. Slides are now posted on Slideshare:

The Winter season for conferences is catching up speed.

DOAG

As I write this the DOAG conference in Germany is happening. It is one of the biggest (or the biggest?) Oracle user group conferences outside of USA. Many of my European friends in the MySQL space are talking there. As you know I have been a big fan of Galera Cluster for MySQL for over a year now, but I was perhaps a bit of an early adopter. Lo-and-behold, I was surprised to see the DOAG related press-release from SkySQL puts the creators of Galera first in their headline: Codership, SkySQL und weitere Top-Experten rund um das Thema ‘MySQL Datenbanken” in Nürnberg versammelt. Talk about crossing the chasm! Ralf Gebhardt, my other mentor from MySQL AB times, is speaking on MySQL HA solutions. Seppo, Erkan and Oli and people from Oracle are talking too.

Percona Live UK, Dec 2-3

It's the time of the year again: You have 2 more weeks to submit a great proposal to the biggest and baddest MySQL Conference: Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo 2013 (Santa Clara). Like many things in the MySQL community, this conference has also gone through a transformation over the past 3 years. But last year the growing pains and uncertainty ended with Percona putting up a great show. Attendance was up again (over 1000) and there was a sense of energy and excitement for the future of MySQL. If you are like me and like to dwell in nostalgia (so that you can get into the right mood for submitting great proposals) my coverage of last year's conference is found here: part 1, part 2. (If you don't care about the nostalgia, remember that speakers get into the conference for free!)

Over the years many blog posts have been written about how to submit a great proposal for the MySQL Conference. By myself, Giuseppe, Baron, Shlomi, just to name a few.

This is the second and final part of my notes from the MySQL conference. In this part I'll focus on the technical substance of talks I saw, and didn't see.

More than ever before I was a contributor rather than attendee at this conference. Looking back, this resulted in seeing less talks than I would have wanted to, since I was speaking or preparing to speak myself. Sometimes it was worse than speaking, for instance I spent half a day picking up pewter goblets from an egnravings shop... (congratulations to all the winners again :-) Luckily, I can make up for some of that by going back and browse their slides. This is especially important whenever 2 good talks are scheduled in the same slot, or in the same slot when I was to speak. So I have categorized topics here along various axes, but also along the "things I did see" versus "things I missed" axis.

My own talks

Tutorial: Evaluating MySQL High Availability alternatives
Using and Benchmarking Galera in Different Architectures