Xaprb

The closest thing I know of to a “Northern Virginia MySQL Meetup” is the Sterling Database Data Solutions Group. I got in touch with the organizer and we scheduled a meeting next Wednesday July 28th. I’ll be presenting, and so will someone from Fusion-IO, a solid-state storage vendor. This is on short notice, so tell your friends about it! It would be great to grow a strong monthly meetup presence in this area.

Here’s the abstract I sent: “This talk covers best practices to help you get the most out of MySQL performance. It assumes you know a database well, though it need not be MySQL. We’ll cover several angles of the topic. Configuration is usually the first thing people ask about. Although it’s possible to misconfigure MySQL and get bad performance, the configuration options you need for good performance are few and rather simple. We’ll see how to inspect MySQL’s performance and status, also a fairly simple subject. Next is query tuning. There are a few surprises in MySQL due to its simpler query execution engine than Oracle or SQL Server. We’ll see how to avoid those surprises and work with the query optimizer. Finally, we’ll focus on what you should know if you are considering migrating part or all of your application from Oracle. There will be plenty of time for questions, so bring yours!”

OmniTI’s Surge conference is looking really good — and I’m going to be speaking there. The CfP just closed, so the list of speakers is still growing, but it already includes impressive names such as Neil J. Gunther. So far, this speaker list has zero fluff, and reminds me of the Percona Performance Conference. I’ll be talking about how not to shard your systems. Sharding is no fun and it’s costly. If you don’t have to do it — and many applications don’t need to, with orders-of-magnitude performance improvements in MySQL — you should not.

For those of you who miss what Maatkit‘s mk-audit tool (now retired) gave you, there’s a pair of tools in Aspersa that more than replaces it. I wrote previously about the summary tool. I don’t think I have mentioned the mysql-summary tool. It has been under development for a while, and at this point it has quite a lot of functionality. You can see a sample of the output on its manual page.