Newsletter: October 2011

Dear Friends,

Here are the highlights of this month's newsletter:

• Support Updates
• Percona Live
• Percona Toolkit
• Percona Server and XtraBackup
• New Percona Team Members
• Key Blog Posts
• Find us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn
• Your Feedback Wanted

As always, I welcome your feedback and suggestions, and hope you find this useful.

Regards,
Baron

Baron Schwartz
Chief Performance Architect
+1-888-401-3401 ext 507
baron@percona.com

Support Updates

We've updated our technical support customer portal. It now has a new landing page that provides you with benefits such as a quick overview of your open tickets, your contract details and prepaid balances and utilization if any, and your configured contact persons (persons with support portal login accounts).

Percona Live Conferences

We have three upcoming Percona Live conferences:

• London, October 24-25. This is a larger event than New York, with a day of tutorials, a day of sessions, and an expo hall area. Early-bird discount pricing expires September 28th. You can also use the special discount code LNDNEWS11 for an additional 20% discount, just for reading this newsletter!
• Washington DC, January 11th. This event will be a bit smaller, like New York, and regionally focused. We'll announce more details soon.
• Santa Clara, California, April 10-12. This event carries on the tradition of the O'Reilly MySQL Conference and Expo.

We've finalized the London program and are organizing the last details before we actually show up and hold the event. We're thrilled to be taking Percona Live international! Remember to use the special discount code LiveUK11 for an additional 10 percent discount at registration!

The call for proposals is now open for the big Santa Clara event, which we're calling the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo. This event will be much larger than our smaller regional conferences. We've rented the traditional location, at the Santa Clara Convention Center. We're organizing all the usual glitter: multiple days of sessions, evening events, and an expo hall. You can read the full announcement here.

Percona Toolkit Release 1.0

We have recently merged two MySQL-related toolkits, Aspersa and Maatkit, and are continuing to develop them as a single Percona Toolkit with best-in-class administrative tools for MySQL administration. The first release is available now, and the roadmap for the next release is well under way. Information about downloads and documentation is on the project homepage.

Percona Server and XtraBackup

We recently released regular Percona Server 5.1 and 5.5 updates.
You can read the release notes here:

• http://www.percona.com/docs/wiki/percona-server:release_notes_51
• http://www.percona.com/docs/wiki/percona-server:release_notes_55

The highlight of recent releases is our improved MEMORY storage engine, which permits dynamic row lengths so you can store BLOB and TEXT data types, and you can store VARCHAR without wasting memory. You can read more about that on the accompanying blog post.

And we released Percona XtraBackup version 1.6.3, which fixes several important bugs. We recommend upgrading. Release notes are here:

• http://www.percona.com/docs/wiki/percona-xtrabackup:release-notes

New Percona Team Members

We have been hiring actively at Percona, and we continue to do so. We are hiring for a variety of positions, including training, sales, consulting, documentation, and support (http://www.percona.com/about-us/careers/). Here are a few recently hired team members and promotions:

• Terry Erisman (Chief Marketing Officer)
• Nikki Morton (promoted to Director of Sales, congratulations!)
• Patrick Crilly (Sales)

Key Blog Posts

Here are key technical blog posts from the MySQL Performance Blog recently:

• When EXPLAIN estimates can go wrong!
• MySQL versions shootout
• Infinite Replication Loop
• Multiple MySQL instances on Fusion-io ioDrive
• When Does InnoDB Update Table Statistics? (And When It Can Bite)
• Percona Server 5.5.15 + Galera 21.1-beta2
• Intel 320 SSD write performance - contd.
• White Paper: Flashcache and MySQL on Virident drive
• Disaster: MySQL 5.5 Flushing
• SELECT UNION Results INTO OUTFILE
• Dynamic row format for MEMORY tables
• Understand InnoDB spin waits, win a Percona Live ticket
• Explaining Indexes with a Library Metaphor
• Recovering Linux software RAID, RAID5 Array
• Getting MySQL Core file on Linux
• Make your file system error resilient
• What's the recommended MySQL version?
• Preprocessing Data
• MySQL performance on EC2/EBS versus RDS

Find us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn

We are on Facebook, Twitter (@Percona) and LinkedIn. Feel free to use those as resources in any way that benefits you—you can post your job ads in our LinkedIn group, for example.

Your Feedback Wanted

We'd like to hear your feedback on how we're doing, so we created a 5-question survey that should take about one minute to fill out.