During Oracle Open World 2012 and the parallel MySQL Connect conference, the new 5.6 version was announced. It’s only release candidate right now, but that means the GA release is just around the corner. With that James Day

Just finished reading Dan Ariely’s new book The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty. What a great title for a book on cheating & lying. Dishonesty is pretty easy to understand, isn’t it? We know when someone is being

A lot of firms come to us with a specific scalability problem. “Our user base is growing rapidly and the website is falling over!” Or they’re selling more widgets, “Our shopping cart is slowing down and we&

1. Avoid destructive commands From time to time I’m working with new recruits and bringing them up to speed in operations. The first thing I emphasize is care with destructive commands. What do I mean here? Well there are al

On a recent twitter chat (#hfchat) I posted some comments about hiring. Some folks were complaining that they had applied to various jobs, and not heard back. I commented… In today’s market, there are hundreds of job applica

What I loved about Percona Live 2011 Last year I was excited to go to Percona Live for the first time in NYC. I arrived just in time to hear Harrison Fisk from Facebook speak about some of the awesome tweaks they’re running

Just back from the Labor Day holiday, and ready to dive back in. I thought this would be a great time to outline some of our upcoming topics so here goes… 1. Why Oracle usability sucks - a rant about Oracle’s weak poin

So many blogs, so little time! Here’s our list of the best we’ve found. Currently our favorite reader is Pulse pictured left. Starting to play around with flipboard too. Nuts & Bolts Technical Slashdot One of the

1. Point In Time Recovery If you’ve never done point in time recovery, it’s time to take a second look. With a standard mysqldump you restore your database to the time when the backup happened. Only do them once a day,

Recently a colleague called me up to get my opinion. Therein lies the eternal drama in organizations, the push & pull between dollars and technology best practices. We had a similar experience with a MySQL deployment, and sol