Blog
Speaking at COSCUP 2026 — Planning your upgrade to MySQL 9.7
I am excited to be speaking at COSCUP 2026 in Taipei, Taiwan on August 8th and 9th. COSCUP (Conference for Open Source Coders, Users and Promoters) is one of the largest open source conferences in Asia, and it is always a privilege to present to the engaged and technically sharp community there.
Producing Two Sample T-Test statistics with SQL
The two sample t-test for equal variance is a statistical test to determine if the means of two groups are different enough that the difference is likely caused by some underlying difference, rather than random chance.
Building your first VillageSQL Extension with AI skills
This is a technical walkthrough of the vsql-extension-builder recently released May 28 at Percona Live Bay Area 2026 and found at https://github.com/villagesql/villagesql-skills . Highlights Install VillageSQL pre-built binary first Install SDK with pre-built binary second Install the skill Run it with your AI tool The output can be found at https://github.
Why using production workloads over simulated workloads is critical
AI-Assisted SQL Tuning Last week in his keynote speech at Percona Live Bay Area 2026 , Andy Pavlo presented Databases: The Final Boss of Agents and provided some useful insights into query optimization of simulated workloads leveraging AI.
Improving your MySQL Security Posture Presentation
At the MySQL BR Conference 2025 I had the opportunity to speak about Improving Your MySQL Security Posture. You can find a copy of my slides on my Presentations , and a Portugese (Brazil) translation.
MySQL and Heatwave Summit Presentation
Last week I had the opportunity to speak at the MySQL and Heatwave Summit in San Francisco. I discussed the impact of the new MySQL 8.0 default caching_sha2_password authentication, replacing the mysql_native_password authentication that was the default for approximately 20 of the 30 years that MySQL has existed.
Readyset QueryPilot Announcement
At the MySQL and Heatwave Summit 2025 today, Readyset announced a new data systems architecture pattern named Readyset QueryPilot . This architecture which can front a MySQL or PostgreSQL database infrastructure, combines the enterprise-grade ProxySQL and Readyset caching with intelligent query monitoring and routing to help support applications scale and produce more predictable results with varied workloads.
More CPUs or Newer CPUs
In a CPU-bound database workload, regardless of price, would you scale-up or scale-new? What if price was the driving factor, would you scale-up or scale-new? I am using as a baseline the first available AWS Graviton2 processor for RDS (r6g).
An Interesting Artifact with AWS RDS Aurora Storage
As part of using public datasets with my own Benchmarking Suite I wanted upsize a dataset for larger volume testing. I have always used the INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLES data_length and index_length columns as a sufficiently accurate measurement for actual disk space used.
How long does it take the ReadySet cache to warm up?
During my setup of benchmarking I run a quick test-sysbench script to ensure my configuration is right before running an hour+ duration test. When pointing to a Readyset cache where I have cached the 5 queries used in the sysbench test, but I have not run any execution of the SQL, throughput went up 10x in 5 seconds.
Monitoring Latency with Throughput
Higher throughput does not imply improved performance. This is a common problem when the need for an application to support more users, you provide higher concurrency and that appears to show the capability to support higher throughput.
Using Readyset Caching with AWS RDS MySQL
Readyset is a next-generation database caching solution that offers a drop-in; no application code changes; approach to improve database performance. If you are using a legacy application where it is difficult to modify SQL statements, or the database is overloaded due to poorly-designed SQL access patterns, implementing a cache is a common design strategy for addressing database reliability and scalability issues.
Sysbench Under the Covers
Sysbench is a popular open-source benchmarking tool designed to evaluate the performance of system components such as CPU, memory, disk I/O, and databases. It is commonly used for testing MySQL, PostgreSQL, and other databases under different load conditions.
Tracking new AWS Database Infrastructure Availability
AWS can drop 10+ articles a day just in the What’s New feed. You either need an eagle eye, or luck to keep up if you run multiple AWS database products across multiple regions and managing infrastructure.