Tag: secondary

Speaking at Percona Live Dublin: keynote, orchestrator tutorial, MySQL testing automation

MySQL

I’m looking forward to a busy Percona Live Dublin conference, delivering three talks. Chronologically, these are:

  • Practical orchestrator tutorial
    Attend this 3 hour tutorial for a thorough overview on orchestrator: what, why, how to configure, best advice, deployments, failovers, security, high availability, common operations, …
    We will of course discuss the new orchestrator/raft setup and share our experience running it in production.
    The tutorial will allow for general questions from the audience and open discussions.
  • Why Open Sourcing Our Database Tooling was the Smart Decision
    What it says. A 10 minute journey advocating for open sourcing infrastructure.
  • MySQL Infrastructure Testing Automation at GitHub
    Co-presenting with Tom Krouper, we share how & why we run infrastructure tests in and near production that gives us trust in many of our ongoing, ever changing operations. Essentially this is “why you should feel OK trusting us with your data”.

See you there!

Remembering Jaakko Pesonen

MySQL

I was sorrowed to hear that Jaakko Pesonen has passed away after battling cancer.

I first met Jaakko a few years back, during a Percona Live conference, and as community goes, our paths crossed again a few times. He spoke at and attended conferences where we’d have casual chats.

We were both expats in the Netherlands for a period. As I moved in from Israel, he was already working at Spil Games, having relocated from Finland, his home country. We shared expat experiences and longings to our homes. One day he pinged me that he was planning a trip to Israel – and the next few days were all about planning the best culinary experience of his travel (he approved of the results).

He was happy for the opportunity to work for Percona, as this allowed him to move back home to Finland.

Jaakko had the biggest, widest, most consuming smile, and this smile will sure be the most vivid memory of him that I’ll keep.

I do not have personal pictures of Jaakko. This picture was taken by Julian Cash at Percona Live. A rare non-smiling appearance.

 

 

 

Orchestrator progress

MySQL

This comes mostly to reassure, having moved into GitHub: orchestrator development continues.

I will have the privilege of working on this open source solution in GitHub. There are a few directions we can take orchestrator to, and we will be looking into the possibilities. We will continue to strengthen the crash recovery process, and in fact I’ve got a couple ideas on drastically shortening Pseudo-GTID recovery time as well as other debts. We will look into yet other directions, which we will share. My new and distinguished team will co-work on/with orchestrator and will no doubt provide useful and actionable input.

Orchestrator continues to be open for pull requests, with a temporal latency in response time (it’s the Holidays, mostly).

Some Go(lang) limitations (namely the import path, I’ll blog more about it) will most probably imply some changes to the code, which will be well communicated to existing collaborators.

Most of all, we will keep orchestrator a generic solution, while keeping focus on what we think is most important – and there’s some interesting vision here. Time will reveal as we make progress.

 

Percona Live 2015: Reflections

MySQL

Some personal reflections on PerconaLive 2015:

Percona acquires Tokutek

Well done! Tokutek develops the TokuDB storage engine for MySQL and TokuMX engine for MongoDB. I will discuss the MySQL aspect only.

TokuDB was released as open source in 2013. It has attained a lot of traction and I have used it myself for some time. I met issues with locking or otherwise operational difficulties which I reported, and otherwise was fascinated by such features as great compression, online schema changes, and more.

Recently another company, InfiniDB, that also released its MySQL-backed codebase as open source, went out of business. I was afraid the same might happen to Tokutek.

I see Percona’s purchase as a very good move for the community. I saw a lot of TokuDB interest in Percona for some time now, and it is clearly interested in the technology. I expect they will add their own hands-on experience into the development of more operations-friendly features; put effort in solving locking issues (it’s been a while since I last checked, of course some of these may have been addressed by now). I am guessing they will work on a Galera/TokuDB integration and offer a “Toku-XtraDB-Cluster”.

TokuDB can compete with InnoDB in many places, while in others each will have its distinct advantage.

I see this is as good news for the community.

Community Awards and Lightning Talks

On a completely different subject, I believe it is commonly accepted that this year’s setup for the community awards & lightning talks was unsuccessful. The noise was astounding, human traffic was interrupting and overall this was a poor experience. We (Giuseppe Maxia, Kortney Runyan & myself) made a quick, informal brainstorming on this and came up with a couple ideas. One of which we hope to try in the upcoming Percona Live Europe – Amsterdam.

We apologize to the speakers for the difficulties.

Percona Live Europe – Amsterdam

Haha! Having recently relocated to the Netherlands I’m of course very happy. But regardless, Percona Live London was fun – and yet running on low fuel. I think it was a great idea to change location (and more locations expected in the future). This is the path taken by such conferences as OSCon, Velocity, Strata and more. Amsterdam in particular, as I’ve recently learned, is especially appreciated by many. I think this conf will do great!

Woz

And now for something completely different. Woz’ talk was that. I’m happy he came; I appreciate that he discussed education; and it was fun.

Percona Live 2015: Reflections; the Apache CCLA offer

MySQL

Facebook, Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, Alibaba, MariaDB, Percona team up and offer Oracle all public changes under the Apache CCLA

Read again please.

My one word summary of this is: Romantic. In the most positive sense.

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer; this is my understanding of the current status and of the offer.

Summarizing the deal: the teams participating with WebScaleSQL would like to push code upstream. Current legal issues limit their options. Existing patches/contributions from Percona & MariaDB are licensed by GPLv2, which Oracle cannot import as it distributes a commercial, closed source, edition, in addition to its open source MySQL community edition.

So what happens is that there is a lot of free code, great patches, new features out there, that are only available via MariaDB or WebscaleSQL or Percona Server, but not in the Oracle MySQL code base. This, in turn, means Oracle re-implements many features originating from said companies. And, more importantly, said companies need to routinely rebase their code on new Oracle releases, repeating tedious work.

The offer is that Oracle agrees to the Apache CCLA as a license by which it would be able to incorporate contributions. Oracle would then be able to use incorporated code in both open source and commercial edition. Oracle will choose what code to incorporate; hopefully many patches will be accepted upstream, and the community will benefit from a rich featureset, rapid developed MySQL server.

Clearly a lot of work, persuasion, lawyer time, discussions etc. have been invested in this effort. I would like to add my humble +1/like/favorite/whathaveyou. You may add yours by letting Oracle know your opinion on the subject. Media tools are great for this.

 

 

MySQL Community Awards 2015: the Winners

MySQL

The MySQL Community Awards initiative is an effort to acknowledge and thank individuals and corporates for their contributions to the MySQL ecosystem. It is a from-the-community, by-the-community and for-the-community effort. The committee is composed of an independent group of community members of different orientation and opinion, themselves past winners or known contributors to the community.

The 2015 community awards were presented on April 15rd, 2015, during the community event at the Percona Live conference. The winners are:

MySQL Community Awards: Community Contributor of the year 2015

  • DaniĂ«l van Eeden
    Daniël has done great work on MySQL security and has continued to fantastically support MySQL User Group.NL. He has also logged a lot of bugs (and submitted patches), across all sorts of different MySQL products and has done a great deal to help improve the quality of MySQL.Daniël consistently provides extremely good feedback, on a wide range of features and products, from MySQL server security, through InnoDB, partitioning, and even on other products such MySQL Enterprise Backup and MySQL Enterprise Monitor. His bugs are always reported with a high quality, and many times he even includes a contribution to fix those bugs.
  • Justin Swanhart
    Justin has worked tirelessly for the past few years on some amazing projects of his own design, Shard-Query and Flexviews. Cross shard aggregation is an extremely complex thing to get right, and Shard-Query takes an interesting approach at this. Flexviews provides a materialized view framework, which is something that MySQL lacks to many people’s annoyance. Additionally Justin has also built some performance_schema related tools, reported many MySQL bugs, and has been a public speaker about MySQL in “can do” style.
  • Morgan Tocker
    In his day job, Morgan is Community Manager at Oracle. While some of his community interaction has been because of his job, he has gone far and beyond his corporate responsibilities. He is one of the most prolific writers on the MySQL Planet, he has been the most public face of MySQL, and he is always asking for feedback and showing a sincere concern for the Open Source community.For example, Morgan’s community polls on what defaults should be changed in MySQL 5.7 put some of the MySQL product decision making directly into the hands of the community. He is a key player on keeping the community and the MySQL developers at Oracle in touch with each other.

MySQL Community Awards: Application of the year 2015

Continue reading » “MySQL Community Awards 2015: the Winners”

Speaking at Percona Live: Pseudo GTID and Easy Replication Topology Management

MySQL

In two weeks time I will be presenting Pseudo GTID and Easy Replication Topology Management at Percona Live. From the time I submitted the proposal a LOT has been developed, experimented, deployed and used with both Pseudo GTID and with orchestrator. In my talk I will:

  • Suggest that you skip the “to GTID or not to GTID” question and go for the lightweight Pseudo GTID
  • Show how Pseudo GTID is used in production to recover from various replication failures and server crashes
  • Do an outrageous demonstration
  • Tell you about 50,000 successful experiments and tests done in production
  • Show off orchestrator and its support for Pseudo GTID, including automated crash analysis and recovery mechanism.

I will further show how the orchestrator tooling makes for a less restrictive, more performant, less locking, non-intrusive, trusted and lightweight replication topology management solution. Continue reading » “Speaking at Percona Live: Pseudo GTID and Easy Replication Topology Management”

Joining Booking.com

MySQL

I’m excited to be joining Booking.com at the Netherlands in a couple weeks 🙂

I’m looking forward to be working with a great team and friendly people! I hope to contribute from my experience and of course be challenged by difficult problems.

Booking.com is a supporter of open source in multiple aspects, and I am looking forward to continue working with open source solutions as well as releasing open source code.

I am leaving my work at Outbrain feeling grateful for the opportunity of working at this wonderful company! I am awed and humbled by the amazing teams I’ve worked with, whose level of knowledge and insights I can only aspire to match. Thank you in particular to the Infrastructure team, of which I was proud to be part of.

Outbrain allowed me and others (and in fact encouraged and supported) to develop as much open source as we saw fit. This is not a minor thing: when you orient your code towards open source, you need to make generalizations which are not always providing direct benefit to the company, and which consume precious time. I hold Outbrain in the highest respect for their support for open source.

 

 

 

Percona Live 2015: Call for Papers is open

MySQL

And not for long!

The Call for Papers for Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo, to be held at Santa Clara in April 2015, is open. The dead line for submissions is Nov. 16th; that’s just around the corner.

As with previous years, we will hold a 4 day conference, the first being a tutorials day and three days for sessions, BoF and lightning talks, as well as community events. The committee is expecting to review at about 250-300 submissions, out of which it will pick at about 100 talks to schedule or reserve.

We will be using these tracks:

  • High Availability
  • DevOps
  • Programming
  • Performance Optimization
  • Replication and Backup
  • MySQL in the Cloud
  • MySQL and NoSQL
  • MySQL Case Studies
  • Security
  • What’s New in MySQL

This year we will roughly pre-define the desired number of sessions we wish to have per track. This is not set in stone and everything is fluid. Yet, this will give us better guidelines at choosing and pursuing content for this conference.

Submitting a proposal

We encourage all members of the community to submit their tutorial/session/BoF proposals as soon as possible. Please register/login at the conference home page.

The guidelines for submitting a proposal are generally unchanged; please review past recommendations: [1], [2], [3], [4]. To add to all these:

  • Do note that we are likely to only review a proposal just once. Please submit only after you have finalized your draft.
  • Make a reasonable length of proposal. We believe 250 – 300 words are quite enough for a good proposal. Please don’t write an essay, and remember that you proposal is what gets printed on the schedule, and what is read by the conference attendees when choosing the next talk to go to.
  • Write a descent Bio.

Continue reading » “Percona Live 2015: Call for Papers is open”

Three wishes for a new year

MySQL

Another new year by Jewish calendar. What do I wish for the following year?

  1. World peace
  2. Good health to all
  3. Multi-core execution for queries

After having evaluated a few columnar databases, and having seen how a single query gets 24 cores busy, I can’t look at MySQL the same way again. The fact that a single query consumes a single core only doesn’t seem right in the year 2014. Shard-query is a cool application-level attempt to solve the above; I would like to see stuff like this implemented inside the server (or inside the storage engine where possible).

None of my wishes in previous years [2010], [2011], [2012], [2013] came true (and mostly gone worse). I’m still willing to settle for two out of three.