Join Percona Chief Evangelist Colin Charles as he covers happenings, gives pointers and provides musings on the open source database community.

This week: a quick roundup of releases, a summary of my thoughts about Percona Live Europe 2017 Dublin, links to look at and upcoming appearances. Oracle OpenWorld happened in San Francisco this past week, and there were lots of MySQL talks there as well (and a good community reception). I have a bit on that as well (from afar).

Look for these updates on Planet MySQL.

Releases

• Red Hat Software Collections 3.0 Beta now has MariaDB 10.2.7, MongoDB 3.4.7 and PostgreSQL 9.6.4 installable on RHEL6 and RHEL7 via SCL. How many deploy with Software Collections?
• PostgreSQL 10 released with logical replication, parallel query, SCRAM-SHA-256 authentication and more. Josh Berkus’ article on LWN is still relevant: A beta for PostgreSQL 10.
• RMariaDB: Database Interface and ‘MariaDB’ Driver is interesting if you’re into R as this driver works for MariaDB AND MySQL, whereas the RMySQL driver is considered legacy! Interesting naming choice?

Percona Live Europe Dublin

I arrived on Sunday and chose to rest for my tutorial on Monday. Ronald Bradford and I delivered a tutorial on MySQL Security, and in the morning we chose to rehearse. Percona Live Europe had a full tutorial schedule this year, albeit with one cancellation: MySQL and Docker by Giuseppe Maxia, whom we missed this conference. Check out his blog for further posts about MySQL, Docker, and SQL Roles in MySQL 8!

We had the welcome reception at Sinott’s Bar. There was a large selection of food on each table, as well as two drinks for each of us. It was lively, and I think we overtook most of the basement. Later that evening, there were drinks around the hotel bar, as people started to stream in for Tuesday’s packed schedule!

Tuesday was the conference kickoff, with Peter Zaitsev doing the opening keynote on the state of the open source database ecosystem. The bonus of this keynote was also the short 5-minute talks that would help you get a pick on the important topics and themes around the conference. I heard good things about this from attendees. While most people attended the talks, I spent most of my day in meetings! Then the Community Dinner (thank you Oracle for sponsoring), where we held this year’s Lightning Talks (and plenty more to drink). A summary of the social events is at Percona Live Europe Social.

Wednesday morning we definitely wanted to start a few minutes later, considering people were streaming in slower thanks to the poor weather (yes, it rained all day). The State of the Dolphin ensured we found out lots of new things coming to MySQL 8.0 (exciting!), then the sponsor keynote by Continuent given by MC Brown, followed by a database reliability engineering panel with the authors of Database Reliability Engineering Charity Majors and Laine Campbell. Their book signing went quickly too – they have many fans. We also heard from Pepper Media on their happy journey with Percona. Another great day of talks before the evening reception (which had less folk, since people were flying off that evening). Feel free to also read Matthias Crauwels, Percona Live Europe 2017 Review.

Percona Live Europe 2017 Dublin had over 350+ attendees, over 140+ speakers – all in a new location! If you have any comments please feel free to shoot me an email.

Oracle OpenWorld from Afar

At this year’s Oracle OpenWorld there was talk about Oracle’s new self-driving, machine-learning based autonomous database. There was a focus on Amazon SLAs.

It’s unclear if this will also be what MySQL gets eventually, but we have in the MySQL world lossless semi-sync replication. Amazon RDS for MySQL is still DRBD based, and Google Cloud SQL does use semisync – but we need to check further if this is lossless semisync or not.

Folk like Panoply.io claim they can do autonomous self-driving databases, and have many platform integrations to boot. Anyone using this?

Nice to see a Percona contribution to remove InnoDB buffer pool mutex get accepted, and apparently it was done the right way. This is sustainable engineering: fix and contribute back upstream!

I was particularly interested in StorageTapper released by Uber to do real-time MySQL change data streaming and transformation. The slide deck is worth a read as well.

Booking.com also gave a talk. My real takeaway from this was about why MySQL is strong: “thousands of instances, a handful of DBAs.” Doug Henschen also talks about a lot of custom automation capabilities, the bonus of which is many are probably already open source. There are some good talks and slide decks to review.

It wouldn’t be complete without Dimitri Kravtchuk doing some performance smackdowns, and I highly recommend you read MySQL Performance: 2.1M QPS on 8.0-rc.

And for a little bit of fun: there was also an award given to Alexander Rubin for fixing MySQL#2: does not make toast. It’s quite common for open source projects to have such bugs, like the famous Ubuntu bug #1. I’ve seen Alexander demo this before, and if you want to read more check out his blog post from over a year ago: Fixing MySQL Bug#2: now MySQL makes toast! (Yes, it says April 1! but really, it was done!) Most recently it was done at Percona Live Santa Clara 2017.

Link List

• Bossie Awards 2017 is out, showcasing the best open source databases and analytical tools. Featured: CockroachDB (based on the Spanner paper), MapD (GPU-powered in-memory database), CrateDB, Greenplum (thank you Pivotal!), Apache Spark, Apache Solr, Apache Arrow, Apache Kudu, Apache Zeppelin, the R Project, Apache Kafka, Cruise Control for Apache Kafka to help manage it, JanusGraph, and Apache TinkerPop. We’ll aim to have relevant sessions on these at Percona Live Santa Clara 2018.
• Franchise is an open source notebook for SQL; Redash is cloud-based, query, visualize and share.
• Query the planet: Geospatial big data analytics at Uber is a deep dive into Uber’s engineering effort to optimize geospatial queries in Presto.
• A Decade of Dynamo: Powering the next wave of high-performance, internet-scale applications is a great retrospective post on Amazon’s Dynamo from Werner Vogels.
• Time Series Database Lectures – Fall 2017 is the CMU Database Group focusing on time series database internals, with recorded videos. Highly recommended. At Percona, we’ve been watching time series databases getting popular and have made them one of our themes for the Percona Live conferences in 2017. 

Upcoming appearances

Percona’s website keeps track of community events, to see where to listen to a Perconian speak. My upcoming appearances are:

• Velocity Europe – 17-20 October 2017, London, UK
• Open Source Summit Europe – 23-26 October 2017, Prague, Czech Republic

Feedback

I look forward to feedback/tips via e-mail at colin.charles@percona.com or on Twitter @bytebot.