High performance MySQL consulting

Welcome to Proven Scaling’s new official home on the web. We’ve been meaning to set up a company blog for quite a while, but since we already have personal blogs, it kept getting pushed to the back burner. Finally, with much ado, it’s up!

A little about Proven Scaling and our history

Proven Scaling was founded by Jeremy Cole and Eric Bergen in May, 2006 in order to provide our skills in MySQL architecture, performance, reliability, and availability to a larger audience. Currently Proven Scaling consists of:

• Jeremy Cole — Jeremy left Yahoo! after 1.5 years, a few months ahead of Eric, to kickstart Proven Scaling in July, 2006. Previous to Yahoo!, Jeremy worked for MySQL AB for 4.5 years as tech writer, trainer, consultant, and occasional developer. Jeremy has a personal blog at jcole.us.
• Eric Bergen — Eric left his 1.5 years at Yahoo! to join Jeremy in September, 2006. Previous to Yahoo!, Eric was responsible for MySQL and related systems at a major domain registrar. Eric has a personal blog at ebergen.net
• Mike Griffiths — Based in London, UK, Mike joined Proven Scaling in November, 2007. Before joining Proven Scaling, Mike worked at Yahoo! for 7 years, responsible for MySQL in Europe, Asia and beyond. Mike has so far steadfastly refused to join the blogosphere, arguing that no-one’s really interested in his thoughts on sport, DIY, perl hacking, warm English beer and the other things which take up his leisure time.

A lot more than consulting…

At Proven Scaling we spend a lot time working on various software projects. Jeremy and Eric have been publishing their own patches to MySQL and other projects for many years. One of the primary reasons for forming a company together in the structure that we have is to ensure that we maintain the hardware resources, ability, and time available to work on these projects and provide them to the public in as quick and efficient manner as possible. In addition to continuing our previous work, Proven Scaling has been working on several new independent projects to solve problems in the MySQL space.

We needed to place to distribute that software along with other widely and not-so-widely available software packages, so we host a software mirror at mirror.provenscaling.com. This site hosts hard to find copies of various software packages we use every day, in addition to RedHat-friendly (and CentOS friendly) yum repositories for many packages. In fact, one of the reasons we are starting this blog is so that we have an official place to keep you updated as to the contents of our mirror site. As we update the mirror with new releases of existing software and entirely new software, we will post entries describing the updates.

What will we blog about?

You can get some idea of the topics you might see here from Jeremy and Eric’s MySQL posts on their personal blogs: MySQL on jcole.us and MySQL on ebergen.net.

In addition to the updates described above, some of the topics we are especially interested in writing about are:

• Announcements of new Proven Scaling software and new releases of our software
• New patches or ideas for patches to MySQL and other software
• Deep dissections of various parts of MySQL and InnoDB
• Knowledge gained from working with our customers, such as advice for real-world scenarios or unexpected situations
• Many more exciting ideas we’re working on, which we will share when they are ready!

Sounds good?

Go ahead and subscribe to our RSS feed, or bookmark this page. Keep an eye on the author names above, so that you know who’s writing.