Join Percona Chief Evangelist Colin Charles as he covers happenings, gives pointers and provides musings on the open source database community.
There is still much going on when it comes to Meltdown/Spectre in our world. Percona’s Vadim Tkachenko and Alexey Stroganov recently published Does the Meltdown Fix Affect Performance for MySQL on Bare Metal?. You also want to read Mark Callaghan’s excellent work on this: Meltdown vs MySQL part 1: in-memory sysbench and a core i3 NUC, XFS, nobarrier and the 4.13 Linux kernel, Meltdown vs MySQL part 2: in-memory sysbench and a core i5 NUC, and Meltdown vs storage. If you’re looking at this from a Cassandra standpoint, do read Meltdown’s Impact on Cassandra Latency. SolarWinds (formerly sponsors at Percona Live), have also released a statement on Meltdown/Spectre: Meltdown/Spectre fixes made AWS CPUs cry, says SolarWinds.
From a FOSDEM standpoint (its just a few weeks away, I hope to meet you there), don’t forget that the community dinner tickets are now on sale, and it happens on Friday 2 February 2018. Remember that the FOSDEM room for MySQL and friends is on Sunday 4 February 2018. And you’ll not want to miss Peter Zaitsev’s talk on Saturday, do read the Interview with Peter Zaitsev MySQL: Scaling & High Availability Production experience for the last decade.
Slack is becoming popular for database related discussions. You can join the MongoDB Community, and it’s a lot more active than the IRC channel on freenode. There is also a MySQL Community on Slack! Currently, the MongoDB community has 927 people in their #general channel, compared to the MySQL channel with 85 people. Will we see MariaDB Server have a Slack channel? Percona?
This past week has been an interesting one for the MySQL world – former CEO posted a little photo and message to Facebook. It’s a public post, hence I am linking to it. It reads, “10 years ago! What memories. A fantastic team. Such a great welcoming by Sun. MySQL did well as part of Sun, and has continued to do so as part of Oracle. Thank you, all you who did it!”. I was in Orlando, Florida when this happened. It was an amazing few days. A USD$1 billion exit may seem small today, but in January 2008 it was all the rage (keep in mind we were preparing for IPO). We may not have created the MySQL mafia-like PayPal managed (too many characters, egos, and concentrated wealth?), but to see how far the ecosystem has come since: forks, branches, usage. All I can say is – an extreme privilege to be part of the journey and ride.
Releases
- Replication Manager 2.0.0 rc1 – now a release candidate with a huge amount of changes, now with ProxySQL support. Works with MySQL, Percona Server for MySQL and MariaDB Server.
- MySQL 5.7.21, MySQL 5.6.39, and MySQL 5.5.59. As always pay attention to the release notes, with quite a few changes for deprecated options in 5.7.
- MariaDB Server 10.3.4 Beta is the second beta with system versioned tables, and a lot more. Do read the release notes too.
Link List
- Graphile – pretty cool, especially PostGraphile which will allow you to get a full GraphQL API based on a PostgreSQL database schema.
- Databases at the Beginning: Bill Karwin, Database Developer @ Square – MySQL Community member, book author, active StackOverflow poster, former Perconian, Bill Karwin gets interviewed on this podcast. There is also a transcript. Recommended listen.
- How to Use ProxySQL as a Load Balancer for MySQL on Ubuntu 16.04 – good DigitalOcean guide.
- How To Measure the Working Set Size on Linux – Brendan Gregg has some code, and the example is MySQL focused, so very relevant to readers.
- Analyzing Cassandra Performance with Flame Graphs – Brendan Gregg, the man behind flame graphs, now a blog post by Jon Haddad about this in the Cassandra world.
- Replication Will Not Start On RDS – MariaDB 10.2 – with workaround, but also interesting to see what changes can affect production.
- Top 10 things to know about Alibaba Cloud RDS – I’ve not seen much talk about Alibaba Cloud outside of China, and this is a good introduction to what’s available. Yes, they have an English interface. Yes, some regions are cheaper outside of China. Yes, mainland China regions now have a short 50% discount. They also have an interestingly diverse set of regions. And today if you’re a new user, you get some free credit — so what are you waiting for?
Upcoming appearances
- FOSDEM 2018 – Brussels, Belgium – February 3-4 2018
- SCALE16x – Pasadena, California, USA – March 8-11 2018
Feedback
I look forward to feedback/tips via e-mail at [email protected] or on Twitter @bytebot.
I think that if anyone in the world has the financial muscels to challenge the dominance of Amazon (and to some extend Microsoft) in this business segment, it is Alibaba.
They will probably focus on their homeland and East Asian countries for a start. SE Asia (Philipinnes, Korea, Indonesia), Russia, India and Australia are probably next. I don’t foresee that they will become very big is the US nor Europe in near future, but if their techncial solutions develops and pricing and support are competetive, it will happen sonner or later. And maybe sooner!
This is an almost complete “plugin replacement” for Amazon RDS and I welcome the competition.
Sorry, I messed up geography. Korea is not in SE Asia – rather in NE Asia. And I am not an American!
(I recall that Mark Twain once said, that God invented war for Americans to learn geography! But I am no better it seems 🙂 )