Newsletter: August 2009

News Items:

• Announcement: Company Birthday
• Two New Consultants Join Percona
• XtraDB, XtraBackup, and Custom Builds
• New Services: Private Training Classes and Public Workshops
• New Services: Migrations
• New Services: High Availability
• New Services: Percona Assurance
• Shift Support Captain
• An Update on mk-upgrade: A Tool To Make Upgrades Safer
• Memcached Optimization with Maatkit
• Moving to the Cloud, RightScale Templates
• What About NoSQL?
• Percona Videos and Screencasts

Announcement: Company Birthday

Percona turned three years old on August 1! We regard our continued growth and success as evidence that we're doing things right for you. We look forward to serving you for many more years.

Two New Consultants Join Percona

Morgan Tocker and Matt Yonkovit have joined our company. Both of them are formerly of Sun/MySQL. Morgan was a trainer and support engineer, and Matt was a professional services consultant. You can read more about them here:

http://www.percona.com/about-us/our-team/matt-yonkovit

XtraDB, XtraBackup, and Custom Builds

The last two months have kept our developers very busy. On July 20, we announced XtraDB 1.0.3-6. It includes Yasafumi's work to reduce InnoDB crash recovery time. In simple tests, we found recovery time to be 10 times faster than a stock InnoDB. It also includes the ability to import tables that have been exported from another server. You can read more about these features on our blog:

http://tinyurl.com/kpgzxa
http://tinyurl.com/lkzzkx

XtraDB has been included in the MariaDB distribution as of a few days ago, which is a very exciting development. It will replace InnoDB in
binary releases of the MariaDB server, and will live alongside PBXT and Sphinx storage engines. Also included are some of our patches to the MySQL server.

We continue to deploy XtraBackup for our existing customers, and there is a lot of buzz about its adoption by people outside Percona as well. In the last couple of months, we have labeled it an RC quality product, and added a couple of useful new features to it. In the last episode of this news we mentioned that we were building the ability to import and export individual tables, and that is now working (in conjunction with XtraDB). If you are using InnoDB or XtraDB tables, this backup solution might make a lot of sense for you. It directly addresses the most common problems that we've seen in our customer's backups.

We have also released 5.0.83-build17 of our customized server. As well as being based off a newer 5.0 release, it contains a new patch (innodb_split_buffer_pool_mutex), designed to improve buffer pool scalability on multi-core systems:

http://tinyurl.com/m369gt

New Services: Private Training Classes and Public Workshops

In July we announced private training courses as a new service. This is essentially customized onsite training. One possibility is for a consultant to come to your office, diagnose your performance problems, and then teach you how he did it. This works great for topics such as DRBD, memcached, MMM, replication & availability, InnoDB tuning, query optimization, and more. For more information, see:

http://www.percona.com/training

Starting in September, we will also be offering public training workshops on InnoDB and XtraDB performance -- an intensive, all-day class on arguably the most important component of your database server. The dates are as follows:

14 Sept - Santa Clara, California, USA
16 Sept - San Francisco, California, USA

The cost for these workshops is $300. For existing customers, we can add this conveniently to your next bill as 1 hour of consulting time, even if your rate is discounted because of a bulk purchase. (A full day of training for the cost of one hour of consulting!) For more information, see:

http://tinyurl.com/my7wfw

New Services: Migrations

If you have some databases that are running on another platform, and you would like to migrate to MySQL, give us a call to discuss. We have provided these types of services on an ad hoc basis in the past, and have successfully migrated quite a few customers off proprietary, expensive database platforms. We have also helped customers solve performance problems after the fact, when we were not involved with the migrations. At this point, we have extensive experience in these types of migrations, and many of our consultants have deep background -- some of them decades -- in other database platforms. We believe in open source technology because it enables customers to do what they want with their systems, and save money at the same time. Let us know if you have any questions, and we would be happy to get on a call with you and discuss your project.

New Services: High Availability

Another service we are ready to formally roll out is high availability. Of course, we have been doing high-availability work for our customers for years. However, much of this has centered around replication, and we have been less involved with high-availability solutions such as DRBD (although we still have done some of this). Now that Matt has joined us, we have another person with particularly deep expertise in DRBD, heartbeat, and related solutions. We are ready for anything you can throw at us!

On a related topic, we are beginning to consider building a new tool for high availability via replication. Many of you are successfully running MMM in production, but some of you have also experienced problems with it. We have done a fairly deep analysis of these problems and their solutions, and it is our opinion that we need to write a new tool to address them. We are currently drafting a complete requirements document, and we expect we will be accepting sponsorship for this tool in the future. This tool will be part of Maatkit. The roadmap is here:

http://code.google.com/p/maatkit/wiki/HighAvailabilityTool

New Services: Percona Assurance

Many of you know us as a company that you can rely on when things go badly. We'd like you to begin thinking of us a little bit differently.

We can help you see the forest as well as the trees, and we can help to tie things together end to end. We can help you to implement best practices around the entire open source stack, and follow them. This is a much more important need than query optimization or installing HA solutions. We have identified three major areas where we think our skills are underutilized:

1) Strategy and tactics for planning, scaling, and managing applications.
2) Proactive maintenance and routine work, with eyes on the system 24x7.
3) Tying the low-level and high-level together so they are not viewed in isolation.

We're planning to bundle all of this up into a service that we call Percona Assurance. The exact pricing and terms will depend on which of the bullet points you select from the menu. In particular, we plan to price routine, less specialized projects at a different rate, and modify the way we work with you so we can do that economically.

We are still hammering out the exact details, but if any of this is of interest to you, we encourage you to contact us. We would love to share early drafts with you, and discuss pricing that would make this financially compelling for you. We want to make it so you can't say no to this service.

Shift Support Captain

On a related note, at no additional charge, we've introduced something we call Shift Support Captain: a person who makes sure things get handled, 24x7.

This person is monitoring email 24x7 (we had someone on-call 24x7, but were not previously monitoring incoming mail 24x7). The Shift Support Captain is also on Google Chat 24x7, so you can chat to and get instant attention. This might work better for you than using our emergency phone line to get an emergency issue started.

An Update on mk-upgrade: A Tool To Make Upgrades Safer

In our last newsletter, we wrote about a tool to make upgrades safer in MySQL:

"We've seen increasing numbers of production deployments of MySQL 5.1, and quite a few customers are looking into upgrading. We see a great need for something to help with these upgrades, and we'd like you to consider contributing to our effort."

We have made good progress since then, thanks to our sponsors and community involvement. The tool is now known as mk-upgrade, and the ideas have been drawn out into three milestones:

http://code.google.com/p/maatkit/wiki/mk_upgrade

Milestone 1 was recently completed, and a couple of customers are already reporting success stories from production. Daniel is now busy working on Milestone 2, where we are implementing checksumming of SELECT statement results, and comparing EXPLAIN before and after.

We are still seeking sponsors, but even more than sponsorship, we are now at the point where we would like you to test mk-upgrade and send in your feedback. Collecting sufficient sample data will help us verify that we are working around all subtle nuances correctly. We expect there to be a number of edge cases that will arise as we begin to cover more of the spectrum of how people use MySQL.

Memcached Optimization with Maatkit

We recently added memcached support to mk-query-digest. Memcached is really just a key-value database, so it makes sense to apply the same scientific analysis techniques to it that you apply to a database. Although it is very fast, that doesn't mean you can't benefit from optimizing how it is used. You can read more about this new feature here:

http://tinyurl.com/mqgr37
http://tinyurl.com/nggl6j

Naturally, we can help you with memcached, just like any other part of the LAMP stack. Give us a call if you need advice.

Moving to the Cloud, RightScale Templates

We've had a number of customers inquire about Amazon EC2 and related technologies, and using virtualization in computing. Morgan wrote an article on our blog about this last month:

http://tinyurl.com/m4cnos

Sometimes cloud computing is a good solution, sometimes not (we use EC2 ourselves for certain things, by the way). Remaining independent lets us evaluate technologies for both their strengths and weaknesses. If you are thinking about making the move to cloud technologies, we'd be happy to provide advice on whether it will work for you.

Along these lines, we are working with RightScale to develop templates for our builds in the EC2 cloud. We are helping with templates for the Percona-5.0 server release series, and for Percona-XtraDB. These are set up "out of the box" with best-practice configurations, and Vadim has spent a lot of time benchmarking them to ensure they are tailored to the virtual environment as well as possible. Tuning is application-specific, so this is still not "THE ideal setup," because that doesn't exist. However, it's much better than simply installing the server with default settings. And we will offer support to RightScale's customers, too.

If you're interested in the performance of Amazon's EBS storage, you might like to read through Vadim's recent blog posts with benchmark results and analysis:

* http://tinyurl.com/mtkg6g
* http://tinyurl.com/lhgwkj

What About NoSQL?

NoSQL is a catch-phrase that has gained mind share in recent weeks. There isn't any formal movement around it, but there are a number of people who are questioning the assumption that all data belongs in a relational database. Like all trends that catch fire and then gain momentum, we are thinking there is something to this movement. But at the same time, we are thinking it's easy to take things too far. Every technology has a purpose, and that includes relational databases.

In one sense, this movement actually matches our vision very closely. For example, for a long time, we have been telling people that the right way to do large-scale search is not to put it into a relational database. This is why we are so heavily involved in Sphinx. You should use the right technology when it makes sense, and there are many cases where that is not a relational database.

We will continue to be an independent, ideology free, levelheaded source of advice for our customers. If you would like to discuss whether relational databases are right for you, we're here to help.

Percona Videos and Screencasts

Several of our consultants have started to make videos and screen-casts demonstrating particular technologies, and explaining how to use them. You can watch them online here:

http://www.percona.tv

Thanks for considering it.

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European Union and other countries. InnoDB is a registered trademark of Oracle
Corporation. Percona is an independent company, and not affiliated with either
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