Xaprb

Years ago I complained bitterly about MySQL’s backwards development and release model, which made guinea pigs out of the paying customers. I think I’d be remiss if I didn’t say it’s been fixed for years. And it’s really fixed right in my opinion — much better than what I proposed.

Congratulations, and thanks, to the MySQL team for superhuman software engineering, release engineering, documentation, bug triage and analysis, and doing a million things right — in other words, making a damn good database, which is hard. You know I still have gripes occasionally, and so do most people, but in the scheme of things — wow. MySQL is awesome.

We’re ironing out a kink that’s preventing Planet MySQL from aggregating VividCortex’s blog feed, so while that’s in progress, I’ll post a quick note on what we’re up to at VividCortex, for the Planet MySQL readers.

VividCortex is a monitoring and analysis product for MySQL, provided as Software-As-A-Service, with agents that run in your systems and report back to our APIs. The agents are super-efficient and non-obtrusive (you’ve probably noticed my posts about Go recently). They gather high-resolution data about your systems and our web application helps you make sense of it.

VividCortex is shockingly easy to install — if you’re slow at the keyboard, it takes 30 seconds. In less than a minute you can get insight into what your MySQL servers are doing. We are in closed beta right now, with a long waiting list. We’re working with a small set of alpha customers to get the product ready for an open beta.

Our technology and UI focus around four key areas: easy observability of all of your systems (including very large numbers of servers), fluidly browsing and inspecting to swiftly drill into areas of interest, advanced and highly accurate problem detection, and problem diagnosis. In all of these areas we’re truly breaking new ground, unlike anything you can get from legacy monitoring systems, whether commercial or opensource. (Can you think of any existing product that can actually diagnose problems for you?)

One of the enabling technologies is a new kind of fault detection algorithm. We’ve written a series of blog posts on this explaining why it’s needed and how it works.

Feel free to ask me more questions, sign up for our beta, or grab me in the halls at the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo. I’d be glad to tell you more.

I’m really looking forward to Percona Live this year. I will be there, along with Kyle Redinger, my co-founder at VividCortex. I feel that this year the conference has come full circle. 2007 was my first year at the conference, and it was amazing. This year is tremendously exciting for me because it feels like we’re back on the 2007 trajectory.

Those were the golden days. Things were a little sad in 2010 and 2011 as the MySQL community tried to figure out the new landscape and O’Reilly decided to stop running the event, but then in 2012 we all said “we’re back!” with the exception of Oracle, who instead arranged MySQL Connect, as part of Oracle Open World. I don’t think that was a huge success. I don’t know if that’s why Oracle has decided to participate in this year’s Percona MySQL conference, but frankly it doesn’t matter. What matters is that they’re there. Oracle is a vital part of the MySQL community and if we didn’t have them it would be a huge loss.

I think I already said this in a previous blog post, but the schedule is freaking amazing. I have never seen a conference — any conference — with such a high-quality session schedule. To get this many concentrated high-quality sessions you usually have to attend a mega-conference with dozens of sessions at a time, most of them fluff.

I also have to give Percona a huge thank-you for seeing this through. I was involved — but only slightly — in the 2012 conference, and I can tell you that no outsider can possibly understand the amount of time, money, and work involved. I heard some people say things like “oh yeah, I’ve organized a big event, I know what’s required” followed by descriptions of “cost” and “difficulty” that made me laugh. The conference Percona is organizing is unimaginably more expensive and difficult. If you want to say thank-you, I know they will be glad to hear it. The committee will also. And let’s give credit to the sponsors, too. It’s a ton of effort and expense for all of them.

Are you going to be there? If not, what the heck is wrong with you? Seriously. If you are involved with MySQL at all, if you use it, if your company uses it — you need to be there. If you haven’t been in 2007, 2008, or 2012, there’s no way you can understand what you’re missing. You need to take my word and show up. Percona is making it ridiculously cheap — I don’t know if they’re even making money at the price they’re charging. The value of that week in Santa Clara is hard to calculate. Just go.