Let’s look at some of the most popular Percona Database Performance Blog posts in 2017.

The closing of a year lends itself to looking back. And making lists. With the Percona Database Performance Blog, Percona staff and leadership work hard to provide the open source community with insights, technical support, predictions and metrics around multiple open source database software technologies. We’ve had over three and a half million visits to the blog in 2017: thank you! We look forward to providing you with even better articles, news and information in 2018.

As 2017 moves into 2018, let’s take a quick look back at some of the most popular posts on the blog this year.

Top 10 Most Read

These posts had the most number of views (working down from the highest):

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

I think the biggest news from last week was from cPanel – if you haven’t already read the post, please do – on Being a Good Open Source Community Member: Why we hesitated on MySQL 5.7. cPanel anticipated MariaDB being the eventual replacement for MySQL, based on movements from Red Hat, Wikipedia and Google. The advantage focused on transparency around security disclosure, and the added features/improvements. Today though, “MySQL now consistently matches or outpaces MariaDB when it comes to development and releases, which in turn is increasing the demand on us for providing those upgraded versions of MySQL by our users.” And …

As we close out the holiday season, let’s look at some data that tells us how to guarantee a successful Black Friday (from a database perspective).

There are certain peak times of the year where companies worldwide hold their breath in the hope that their databases do not become overloaded or unresponsive. A large percentage of yearly profits are achieved in a matter of hours during peak events. It is critical that the database environment remains online and responsive. According to a recent survey, users will not wait more than 2.5 seconds for a site to load before navigating elsewhere. Percona has partnered with many clients over the years to ensure success during these critical events. Our goal is always to provide our clients with the most responsive, stable open-source database environments in order to meet their business needs.

First Stop: Germany …

Percona is extending the Percona Live 2018 call for papers deadline to January 12, 2018!

Percona’s gift to you this holiday season is the gift of time – submit your speaking topics right up until January 12, 2018!

As the year winds up, we received many requests to extend the Percona Live Open Source Database Conference 2018 call for papers. Since many speakers wanted to submit during the week that they’re planning vacations (from Christmas until New Year’s Day), we realized that December 22 was too soon.

If you haven’t submitted already, please consider doing so. Speaking at …

We’re completing our move of Percona bug tracking into JIRA, and the drop-dead date is December 28, 2017.

For some time now, Percona has maintained both the legacy Launchpad bug tracking system and a JIRA bug tracking system for some of the newer products. The time has come to consolidate everything into the JIRA bug tracking system.

Assuming everything goes according to schedule, on December 28, 2017, we will copy all bug reports in Launchpad into the appropriate JIRA projects (with the appropriate issue state). The new JIRA issue will link to the original Launchpad issue, and the new JIRA issue link is added to the original Launchpad issue. Once this is done, we will then turn off editing on the Launchpad projects.

Q&A Which Launchpad projects are affected?

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This post is a hands-on look at ZFS with MySQL.

In my previous post, I highlighted the similarities between MySQL and ZFS. Before going any further, I’d like you to be able to play and experiment with ZFS. This post shows you how to configure ZFS with MySQL in a minimalistic way on either Ubuntu 16.04 or Centos 7.

Installation

In order to be able to use ZFS, you need some available storage space. For storage – since the goal here is just to have a hands-on experience – we’ll use a simple file as a storage device. Although simplistic, I have now been using a similar setup on my laptop for nearly three years (just can’t get rid of it, it is too useful). For simplicity, I suggest you use a small Centos7 or Ubuntu 16.04 VM with one core, 8GB of disk and 1GB of RAM.

First, you need to install …

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

I spent all of this week at O’Reilly Velocity EU London. I gave a tutorial, a talk and generally networked with attendees (besides my normal evangelical duties). I’ll write some thoughts on it later (probably in a couple of weeks, as Open Source Summit Europe happens next week – and Percona has a booth there).

This will be a quick, short post.

Releases

A few security releases this past week, with some bug fixes as well:

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In this blog, I’ll look at how to use ClickHouse for parallel log processing.

Percona is seen primarily for our expertise in MySQL and MongoDB (at this time), but neither is quite suitable to perform heavy analytical workloads. There is a need to analyze data sets, and a very popular task is crunching log files. Below I’ll show how ClickHouse can be used to efficiently perform this task. ClickHouse is attractive because it has multi-core parallel query processing, and it can even execute a single query using multiple CPUs in the background.

I am going to check how ClickHouse utilizes multiple CPU cores and threads. I will use a server with two sockets, equipped with “Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2683 v3 @ 2.00GHz” in each. That gives a total of 28 CPU cores / 56 CPU threads.

To analyze workload, I’ll use an Apache log file from one of Percona’s servers. …

“To be competitive with non-open-source cloud deployment options, open source databases need to invest in “ease-of-use.” There is no tolerance for complexity in many development teams as we move to “ops-less” deployment models.” –Peter Zaitsev

I have interviewed Peter Zaitsev, Co-Founder and CEO of Percona.
In this interview, Peter talks about the Open Source Databases market; the Cloud; the scalability challenges at Facebook; compares MySQL, MariaDB, and MongoDB; and presents Percona’s contribution to the MySQL and MongoDB ecosystems.

RVZ

Q1. What are the main technical challenges in obtaining application scaling?

Peter Zaitsev: When it comes to scaling, there are different types. There is a Facebook/Google/Alibaba/Amazon scale: these …

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

Has a week passed already? Welcome back to the second column. A lot of time has been spent neck deep in getting speakers accepted and scheduled for Percona Live Open Source Database Conference Europe 2017 in Dublin, as well organizing the conference sponsors.

Percona Live Europe Dublin

At the time of writing, we are six weeks away from the conference, so a little over a month! Have you registered yet? …