Welcome to a new series of blogs: Percona Live featured tutorial speakers! In these blogs, we’ll highlight some of the tutorial speakers that will be at this year’s Percona Live conference. We’ll also discuss how these tutorials can help you improve your database environment. Make sure to read to the end to get a special Percona Live 2017 registration bonus!

In this Percona Live featured tutorial, we’ll meet Giuseppe Maxia, Quality Assurance Architect at VMware. His tutorial is on MySQL Document Store: SQL and NoSQL United. MySQL 5.7 introduced document store, which allows asynchronous operations …

In this blog post, we’ll look at what MySQL does under the hood to transform NoSQL requests to SQL (and then store them in InnoDB transactional engine) when using the X Plugin.

X Plugin allows MySQL to function as a document store. We don’t need to define any schema or use SQL language while still being a fully ACID database. Sounds like magic – but we know the only thing that magic does is make planes fly!

Alexander already wrote a blog post exploring how the X Plugin works, with some examples. In this post, I am going to show some more query examples and how they are transformed.

I have enabled the slow query …

“Isn’t it ironic that in 2016 a non-skilled user can find a web page from Google’s untold petabytes of data in millisecond time, but a highly trained SQL expert can’t do the same thing in a relational database one billionth the size?.–Jim Starkey.

I have interviewed Jim Starkey. A database legend, Jim’s career as an entrepreneur, architect, and innovator spans more than three decades of database history.

RVZ

Q1. In your opinion, what are the most significant advances in databases in the last few years?

Jim Starkey: I’d have to say the “atom programming model” where a database is layered on a substrate of peer-to-peer replicating distributed objects rather than disk files. The atom programming model enables scalability, redundancy, high availability, and distribution not available in traditional, disk-based database …

The MySQL Document Store functionality allows developers to use a relation database with or without SQL (structured Query Language), also known as NoSQL. The example in this blog is hopefully a simple look at this new feature of MySQL. The example data used is from JSONStudio.com and is a JSON formatted data set for US zip (postal) codes (656K compressed). So download your copy of this data set and lets get to work.

Create a collectionCollections are tables and below we create a collection name 'zip' in the test database in the Python dialect.

mysqlsh -u root -p --py test
Creating an X Session to root@localhost:33060/test
Enter password:
Default schema `test` accessible through db.

Welcome to MySQL Shell 1.0.4 Development Preview

Copyright (c) 2016, Oracle and/or its affiliates. …

Is it cheating? Is using MySQL without Structured Query Language (SQL) or putting all your data into one column proper? Impossible a year ago and probably thought as a poor/crazy practice until recently, this is a new type of MySQL usage. NoSQL has had a big impact in the SQL world with several relational products from vendors like MySQL, Microsoft, Postgresql and others offering NoSQL interfaces and JSON data types to their databases.

Several old timers have come to me asking if putting lots of data in a JSON column is cheating? After all data normalization is part of relational databases and the way to efficiency and speed is well organized data. This higgledy–piggledy fashion of putting an entire document in a column without breaking it down to its component sections does violate the first rule of data normalization. And that has …

When it comes to building database applications and solutions, developers, DBAs, engineers and architects have a lot of new and exciting tools and technologies to play with, especially with the Hadoop and NoSQL environments growing so rapidly.

While it’s easy to geek out about these cool and revolutionary new technologies, at some point in the development cycle you’ll need to stop to consider the real-world business implications of the application you’re proposing. After all, you’re bound to face some tough questions, like:

Why did you choose that particular database for our mission-critical application? Can your team provide 24/7 support for the app? Do you have a plan to train people on this new technology? Do we have the right hardware infrastructure to support the app’s deployment? How are you going to ensure there won’t be any bugs or security vulnerabilities?

If you don’t have a plan for …

The MySQL Document Store introduced with version 5.7.12 allows developers to create document collections without have to know Structured Query Language. The new feature also comes with a new set of terminology. So let us create a collection and see what it in it (basically creating a table for us SQL speakin' old timers).

So start the mysqlsh program, connect to the server, change to the world-x schema (database) switch to Python mode, a create a collection (table).

What did the server do for us? Switching to SQL mode, we can use describe to see what the server has done for us.

We have a two column …

Last time this blog covered digging into a JSON document in a MySQL 5.7 table. The goal was to pull certain records matching a particular criteria. Both Peter Zaitsev and Morgan Tocker get my thanks for their kind comments. My example was a little contrived in that an application would be used to fine tune seeking for a particular key value pair. I was trying to pull single records which is kind of silly when it is much easier to use PHP to parse the data. What follows below is a sample PHP script to grab out the matching records and then feed the results, the JSON document, into an array.

#!/usr/bin/php
<?php
$mysqli = new mysqli("localhost", "root", "hidave", "test");

/* check connection */
if (mysqli_connect_errno()) {
    printf("Connect failed: %s\n", …

“Leading enterprises have a firm grasp of the technology edge that’s relevant to them. Better data analysis and disambiguation through semantics is central to how they gain competitive advantage today.”–Alan Morrison.

I have interviewed Alan Morrison, senior research fellow at PwC, Center for Technology and Innovation.
Main topic of the interview is how the Big Data market is evolving.

RVZ

Q1. How do you see the Big Data market evolving? 

Alan Morrison: We should note first of all how true Big Data and analytics methods emerged and what has been disruptive. Over the course of a decade, web companies have donated IP and millions of lines of code that serves as the foundation for what’s being built on top.  In the …

The main schedule for the Percona Live Data Performance Conference is available. Almost everything has been defined. There are tutorials and plenty of sessions waiting for conference attendees.

One thing that is still undefined is the session of lightning talks. The …