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

Beyond spending time getting ready for Velocity and Open Source Summit Europe this week, there was some feature testing this week that compared MySQL and MariaDB. Naturally, a long report/blog is coming soon. Stay tuned.

Releases

I reckon a lot of folks are swamped after Percona Live Europe Dublin and Oracle OpenWorld, so the releases in the MySQL universe are a bit quieter.

• Percona Monitoring and Management 1.3.2. Fixes around Query Analytics
• MariaDB 10.3.2. Another alpha release that included instant ADD COLUMN contributed by Tencent, as well as storage-engine-independent column compression contributed by Tencent/AliSQL. Percona Server for MySQL has column compression, but this is naturally a different implementation. Read more about Storage-Engine-Independent Column Compression, compare it with Compressed columns with dictionaries if you like, and probably the best documentation for instant ADD COLUMN is this blog post.

Link List

• Query Analyzer: A Tool for Analyzing MySQL Queries Without Overhead. This is a cool post from LinkedIn.
• How To Test the Database. Daniel Nichter of Hack MySQL fame now writes at his new site, Hack Mongo.
• Different I/O Access Methods for Linux, What We Chose for Scylla, and Why. While the article has ScyllaDB in the title, it stands on its own when it comes to learning about different I/O patterns and tradeoffs. Well worth a read.
• Distributed consistency at scale: Spanner vs. Calvin
• The MySQL 8.0.3 release candidate has backup locks, quite similar to what’s been in Percona Server for MySQL. This is great news!
• Andy Jassy tweeted that Amazon Web Services Database Migration Service just hit 40,000 migrations. This is amazing, considering the service launched late 2015 and the general idea has always been “migrations are hard, start your next database project with the new tool.”

Upcoming Appearances

Percona’s website keeps track of community events, so check out where to see and 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 was asked why there weren’t many talks from MariaDB Foundation / MariaDB Corporation at Percona Live Europe 2017. Simple answer: there were hardly any submissions. We had two talk submissions from one speaker from the MariaDB Foundation (we accepted the one on MariaDB 10.3). There was another talk submission from a speaker from MariaDB Corporation (again, accepted). We announced the second talk in the sneak preview, but the talk was canceled as the speaker was unable to attend. We did, however, have a deep breadth of talks about MariaDB, with many talks that discussed high availability, security, proxies and the like.

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