Paul Vallée (of Pythian fame) has been working on Tehama for sometime, and now he gets to do it full time as a PE firm, bought control of Pythian’s services business. Pythian has more than 350 employees, and 250 customers, and raised capital before. More at Ottawa’s Pythian spins out software platform Tehama.

Database leaks data on most of Ecuador’s citizens, including 6.7 million children – ElasticSearch.

Percona has launched Percona Distribution for PostgreSQL 11. This means they have servers for MySQL, MongoDB, and now PostgreSQL. Looks very much like a packaged server with tools from 3rd parties (source).

Severalnines has launched Backup Ninja, an agent-based SaaS service to backup popular databases in the cloud. Backup.Ninja (cool URL) supports MySQL (and variants), MongoDB, PostgreSQL and TimeScale. No pricing available, but it is free for 30 days.

Comparing Database Types: How Database Types Evolved to Meet Different Needs

New In PostgreSQL 12: Generated Columns – anyone doing a comparison with MariaDB Server or MySQL?

Migration Complete — Amazon’s Consumer Business Just Turned off its Final Oracle Database – a huge deal as they migrated 75 petabytes of internal data to DynamoDB, Aurora, RDS and Redshift. Amazon, powered by AWS, and a big win for open source (a lot of these services are built-on open source).

MongoDB and Alibaba Cloud Launch New Partnership – I see this as a win for the SSPL relicense. It is far too costly to maintain a drop-in compatible fork, in a single company (Hi Amazon DocumentDB!). Maybe if the PostgreSQL layer gets open sourced, there is a chance, but otherwise, all good news for Alibaba and MongoDB.

MySQL 8.0.18 brings hash join, EXPLAIN ANALYZE, and more interestingly, HashiCorp Vault support for MySQL Keyring. (Percona has an open source variant).

At lunch, I realised that there are a lot more fringe events happening around Percona Live… and if you’ve seen how people do “tech weeks”, maybe this is what the event ends up being – a show, plus plenty of focused satellite events. FOSDEM in the open source world totally gets this, and best of all, also lists fringe events (see example from 2019).

So, Thursday evening gets a few fringe events, a relatively short train ride away:

• ClickHouse Paris Meetup 2019
• ProxySQL Technology Day Ghent

Anyway, what was Day 1 like? Keynotes started the morning, and I did make a Twitter thread. It is clear that there is a lot of talk amongst companies that make open source software, and companies in the ecosystem that somehow also derive great value from it. Some look at this as the great cloud vendors vs open source software vendors debate, but this isn’t necessarily always the case – we’ve seen this as Percona’s model too. And we’ve seen cloud companies contribute back (again, just like Percona). Guess this is a topic for a different post, because there are always two sides to this situation…

It is also clear that people want permissive open source licenses over anything source available. If you’re a CxO looking for software, it would be almost irresponsible to be using critical software that is just source available with a proprietary license. After all, what happens when the company decides to ask for more money? (Companies change ownership too, you know).

It is probably clear the best strategies are the “multi” (or hybrid) strategies. Multiple databases, multiple clouds, and going all in on open source to avoid vendor lock-in. Of course, don’t forget that open source software also can have “vendor lock-in” – always look at the health metrics of a project, vs. a product. We’re lucky in the MySQL ecosystem that we have not just the excellent work of Oracle, but also MariaDB Corporation / MariaDB Foundation and also Percona.

MySQL 8.0 adoption is taking off, with about 26% of the users on it. Those on MySQL 5.6 still seem to be on it, and there has been a decrease in 5.7 use to grow that 8.0 pie. It isn’t clear how these stats are generated (since there is no “phone home” functionality in MySQL; also the MariaDB Server variant doesn’t get as much usage as one would like), but maybe it is via download numbers?

Anyone paying any attention to MySQL 8 will know that they have switched to a “continuous delivery model”, also known as, you get new features in every point release. So the latest 8.0.18 gets EXPLAIN ANALYZE, and while we can’t try it yet (not released, and the documentation isn’t updated), I expect it will be fairly soon. I am eager to try this, because MariaDB Server has had ANALYZE since 10.1 (GA – Oct 2015). And it wasn’t long ago that MySQL received CHECK constraints support (8.0.16). Also the CLONE plugin in 8.0.17 warrants some checking/usage!

Besides all the hallway chats and meetings I did manage to get into a few sessions… Rakuten Intelligence talked about their usage of ProxySQL, and one thing was interesting with regard to their future plans slide – they do consider group replication but they wonder what would replace their custom HA software? But most importantly they wonder if it is stable and which companies have successfully deployed it, because they don’t want to be the first. Question from the floor about Galera Cluster came up, and they said they had one app that required XA support – looks like something to consider once Galera 4 is fully baked!

The PXC–8 talk was also chock full of information, delivered excellently, and something to try soon (it wasn’t quite available yesterday, but today I see a release announcement: Experimental Binary of Percona XtraDB Cluster 8.0).

I enjoyed the OpenCorporates use case at the end too. From the fact that for them, being on-premise would be cheaper than the cloud, how they use ProxySQL, Galera Cluster branch Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC), and ZFS. ZFS is not the most common filesystem for MySQL deployments, so it was interesting to see what could be achieved.

Then there was the Booking.com party and boy, did they outdo themselves. We had a menu, multi-course meal with wine pairings, and a lot of good conversation. A night wouldn’t be complete without some Salmiakkikossu, and Monty sent some over for us to enjoy.

Food at the Hilton has been great too (something I would never really want to say, considering I’m not a fan of the hotel chain) – even the coffee breaks are well catered for. I think maybe this has been the best Percona Live in terms of catering, and I’ve been to a lot of them (maybe all…). I have to give much kudos to Bronwyn and Lorraine at Percona for the impeccable organisation. The WiFi works a charm as well. On towards Day 2!

Seems like there are 2 talks about it though, one about real world usage on Oct 1, and one about firewall usage with AWS, given by Marco Tusa on Oct 2.

Which led me to the ProxySQL Technology Day 2019 in Ghent, Belgium. October 3 2019. 2 hour train ride away from Amsterdam Schipol (the airport stop). It is easy to grab a ticket at Schipol Plaza, first class is about €20 more per way than second class, and a good spot to stay could be the Ibis Budget Dampoort (or the Marriott Ghent). Credit card payments accepted naturally, and I’m sure you can also do this online. Didn’t take me longer than five minutes to get all this settled.

So, the ProxySQL Technology Day is free, seems extremely focused and frankly is refreshing because you just learn about one thing! I feel like the MySQL world misses out on this tremendously as we lost the users conference… Interesting to see if this happens more in our ecosystem!

Anyway, I’ll be at the developer’s unconference this weekend in NYC. Even managed to snag a session on the schedule, MySQL features missing in MariaDB Server (Sunday, 12.15–13.00). Signup on meetup?

Due to the prevalence of “VIP tickets”, I too signed up for M|18. If you need a discount code, I’ll happily offer them up to you to see if they still work (though I’m sure a quick Google will solve this problem for you). I’ll publish notes, probably in my weekly column.

If you’re in New York and want to say hi, talk shop, etc. don’t hesitate to drop me a line.

Topics of interest: MySQL, MongoDB, PostgreSQL & other open source databases. Don’t forget all the upcoming databases too (there’s a long list at db-engines).

I think to be fair, in the catch all “other”, we should also be thinking a lot about things like containerisation (Docker), Kubernetes, Mesosphere, the cloud (Amazon AWS RDS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud SQL, etc.), analytics (ClickHouse, MariaDB ColumnStore), and a lot more. Basically anything that would benefit an audience of database geeks whom are looking at it from all aspects.

That’s not to say case studies shouldn’t be considered. People always love to hear about stories from the trenches. This is your chance to talk about just that.

What are you waiting for? Submit TODAY!
(It goes without saying that speakers get a free pass to attend the event.)

So what are you waiting for when it comes to submitting to Percona Live Europe Dublin 2017? Call for presentations close on July 17 2017, the conference has a pretty diverse topic structure (MySQL [and its diverse ecosystem including MariaDB Server naturally], MongoDB and other open source databases including PostgreSQL, time series stores, and more).

And I think we also have a pretty diverse conference committee in terms of expertise. You can also register now. Early bird registration ends August 8 2017.

I look forward to seeing you in Dublin, so we can share a pint of Guinness. Sláinte.

• db tech showcase 2017 – 16-17 June 2017 – Tokyo, Japan. I’m giving a talk about best practices around MySQL High Availability.
• O’Reilly Velocity 2017 – 19-22 June 2017 – San Jose, California, USA. I’m giving a tutorial about best practices around MySQL High Availability. Use code CC20 for a 20% discount.

I look forward to meeting with you at either of these events, to discuss all things MySQL (High Availability, security, cloud, etc.), and how Percona can help you.

As I write this, I’m in Budva, Montenegro, for the Percona engineering meeting.

• rootconf – May 11-12 2017 – Bangalore, India. My first Rootconf was last year, and it was a great event; I look forward to going there again this year, to talk about capacity planning for your databases. If you register with this link you get a 10% discount.
• Open Source Data Center Conference – May 16-18 2017 – Berlin, Germany. I’ve enjoyed my trips to OSDC in the last few years, and they’re on their last tickets now – so register if you plan to go!

• How we use MySQL today – April 10 2017 – New York MySQL meetup. I am almost certain this will be very interesting with the diversity of speakers and topics.
• Percona Live 2017 – April 24-27 2017 – Santa Clara, California. This is going to be huge, as its expanded beyond just MySQL to include MongoDB, PostgreSQL, and other open source databases. Might even be the conference with the largest time series track out there. Use code COLIN30 for the best discount at registration.

I will also be in attendance at the MariaDB Developer’s (Un)Conference, and M|17 that follows.