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

Grading is underway for talks at Percona Live Europe 2018. I understand that by next week you will see the tutorial schedule released. As part of the program committee, I have enjoyed reviewing tutorials, and I reckon there is great competition for the schedule. I suggest you register now, and don’t forget to book your accommodation (need a discount?).

A video worth watching: …

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

Don’t wait, submit a talk for Percona Live Europe 2018 to be held in Frankfurt 5-7 November 2018. The call for proposals is ending soon, there is a committee being created, and it is a great conference to speak at, with a new city to boot!

Releases

• A big release, MySQL 8.0.12, with INSTANT ADD COLUMN support, BLOB optimisations, changes around replication, the query rewrite plugin and lots more. Naturally this also means the connectors get bumped up to the 8.0.12, including a nice new …

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

Hello again after the hiatus last week. I’m en route to Portland for OSCON, and am very excited as it is the conference’s 20th anniversary! I hope to see some of you at my talk on July 19.

On July 18, join me for a webinar: MariaDB 10.3 vs. MySQL 8.0 at 9:00 AM PDT (UTC-7) / 12:00 PM EDT (UTC-4). I’m also feverishly working on an update to MySQL vs. MariaDB: Reality Check, now that both MySQL 8.0 and MariaDB Server 10.3 are generally available.

Rather important: …

Announcing the opening of the Percona Live Europe Open Source Database Conference 2018 in Frankfurt, Germany call for papers. It will be open from now until August 10, 2018. The conference takes place November 5–7.

Our theme this year is
Connect. Accelerate. Innovate.

As a speaker at Percona Live Europe, you’ll have the opportunity to CONNECT with your peers—open source database experts and enthusiasts who share your commitment to improving knowledge and exchanging ideas. ACCELERATE your projects and career by presenting at the premier open source database event, a great way to build your personal and company brands. And influence the evolution of the open source software movement by demonstrating how you INNOVATE!

Community initiatives …

Percona announces the GA release of Percona Server for MySQL 5.7.22-22 on on May 31, 2018. Download the latest version from the Percona web site or the Percona Software Repositories. You can also run Docker containers from the images in the Docker Hub repository.

Based on MySQL 5.7.22, including all the bug fixes in it, Percona Server for MySQL 5.7.22-22 is the current GA release in the Percona Server for MySQL 5.7 series. Percona …

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

rootconf.in 2018 just ended, and it was very enjoyable to be in Bangalore for the conference. The audience was large, the conversations were great, and overall I think this is a rather important conference if you’re into the “DevOps” movement (or are a sysadmin!). From the data store world, Oracle MySQL was a sponsor, as was MyDBOPS (blog), and Elastic. There were plenty more, including Digital Ocean/GoJek/Walmart Labs — many MySQL users.

I took a handful of pictures with people, and here are some of the MyDBOPS team and myself.  They have over 20 …

So, after a whirlwind few days, Percona Live 2018 has been and gone. There was a great energy about the conference, and it was fantastic to meet so many open source database enthusiasts and supporters. A few things that I experienced:

• Your great willingness to share knowledge. It was a fantastic place to learn for those who have experience from a different field of technology. Almost everyone seemed to be very open and generous with their time.
• The “superstars” from our industry are not so scary. They are as willing to be open and generous with their experience and views as any of the other attendees, and equally as interested in making new discoveries.
• There aren’t many times you can sit down to a (community) dinner, to share food and anecdotes with people from USA, UK, Germany and Armenia at the same time. I thoroughly enjoyed the company, …

The requirements for managing and running a database in a modern enterprise have evolved over the past ten years. Those in charge of running enterprise databases have seen their focus shift from ensuring access and availability, to architecture, design and scalability responsibilities. Web-first companies pioneered the change by charging site reliability engineers (SRE’s) or multi-faceted DBAs with the task of ensuring that the company’s main revenue engine not only stayed up, but could scale to wherever the business needed to go. This is a far cry from the classic enterprise DBA’s top responsibilities: keep it up, keep it backed up, and react to issues as they present themselves.

Today, enterprises look for new revenue models to keep up with a shifting technology paradigm driven by the cloud. The requirements and needs for managing their database environments are changing along with this shift. In the SaaS world, application outages …

One of the highlights of Percona Live is that the winners of the annual MySQL Community Awards are announced. A 100% community effort, the awards were created to recognize community contribution. This year saw six very deserving winners in three categories:

MySQL Community Awards: Community Contributor of the year 2018

Two individuals received these awards:

• Jean-François Gagné
  Jean-François was nominated for his many blog posts, bug reports, and experiment results that make MySQL much better. His blog: https://jfg-mysql.blogspot.com/
• Sveta Smirnova
  Sveta spreads knowledge and good practice on all things MySQL as a frequent speaker and blogger. Her years of experience in testing, support, and consulting are shared in webinars, technical posts, conferences around the world …

We’re moving along at Percona Live 2018, and there are still packed and energetic talks after lunch.

My next session was with Andrew Regner, Production Engineer at Facebook. His talk was on securing access to Facebook’s databases.

Since the beginning, Facebook has used a conventional username/password to secure access to production MySQL instances. Over the last few years, they’ve been working on moving to x509 TLS client certificate authenticated connections. Given the many types of languages and systems at Facebook that use MySQL in some way, this required a massive amount of changes for a lot of teams.

This talk is both a technical overview of how their new solution works and hard-learned tricks for getting an entire company to change their underlying MySQL client libraries.

After his talk, …