I’ll be presenting at Oracle Open World on the causes of downtime in MySQL, and how to prevent it. This is a research-based session that presents an easy-to-digest post-mortem of hundreds of emergency issues filed by Percona customers. The real causes and types of downtime surprised me quite a bit, and the preventions run counter to a lot of conventional wisdom. I’ll just give a preview by saying that you should consider it a top priority to monitor how full your disks are! On the other hand, despite the fact that every monitoring tool in existence shows the binary log cache hit rate, not a single emergency in Percona history has ever been attributed to that.

The agenda at OOW is mind-bogglingly huge (see Dave Stokes’s blog post, so here are the full official details of my session: