In this blog post, I’ll look at a comparison of PostgreSQL and MySQL.

I came across a post from Hans-Juergen Schoenig, a Postgres consultant at Cybertec. In it, he dismissed MySQL and showed Postgres as better. While his post ignores most of the reasons why MySQL is better, I will focus on where his post is less than accurate. Testing for MySQL was done with Percona Server 5.7, defaults.

Mr. Schoenig complains that MySQL changes data types automatically. He claims inserting 1234.5678 into a numeric(4, 2) column on Postgres produces an error, and that MySQL just rounds the number to fit. In my testing I found this to be a false claim:

mysql> CREATE TABLE data (
    -> id    integer NOT NULL, …

The website or mobile app is the storefront for participating in the modern digital era. It’s your portal for inviting users to come and survey your products and services. Much attention focuses on front-end development; this is where the HMTL5, CSS, and JavaScript are coded to develop the landing page that everyone sees when they visit your site.

But the real magic happens on the backend. This is the ecosystem that really powers your website. One writer has articulated this point very nicely as follows:

The technology and programming that “power” a site—what your end user doesn’t see but what makes the site run—is called the back end. Consisting of the server, the database, and the server-side applications, it’s the behind-the-scenes functionality—the brain of a site. …

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

We are five weeks out to the conference! The tutorials and the sessions have been released, and there’s an added bonus – you can now look at all this in a grid view: tutorials, day one and day two. Now that you can visualize what’s being offered, don’t forget to register.

If you want a discount code, feel free to email me at …

The ConFoo Team is pleased to announce the opening of its call for paper for its Montreal event.

To celebrate its 15th anniversary, CooFoo will be focusing its 2018 Montreal edition on “Experiment & Learn”. Indeed, as Montreal is becoming one of the world emerging AI advanced research centers, disrupting the global innovation scene, we are particularly interested in gathering and exchanging with developers in the AI community.

If you live in Montreal you can be proud ambassadors of this innovative mindset that pervades the developers’ ecosystem. If you come from elsewhere you obviously have a passion for data learning, model development, and the various industries to apply your knowledge (healthcare, finance, automotive…)

Don’t miss this unique opportunity to share your experience with passionate developers. Whether in artificial intelligence or other …

From everyone at Percona and Percona Live 2017, we’d like to send a big thank you to all our sponsors, exhibitors, and attendees at this year’s conference.

This year’s conference was an outstanding success! The event brought the open source database community together, with a technical emphasis on the core topics of MySQL, MariaDB, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, AWS, RocksDB, time series, monitoring and other open source database technologies.

We will be posting tutorial and session presentation slides at the Percona Live site, and all of them should be available shortly. 

Highlights This Year:

• Informative tutorials on day one, including …

The afternoon at Percona Live 2017 is slipping by quickly, and people are still actively looking for sessions to attend – like the session I just sat in on histograms in MySQL and MariaDB.

Histograms are a type of column statistic that provides more detailed information about data distributions in table columns. A histogram sorts values into buckets.

MariaDB Server has had histograms since MariaDB 10.0. Now, MySQL 8.0 will have them too. This session presented an overview of histogram implementations in MariaDB, MySQL 8.0, and looked at PostgreSQL for comparison. The session covered everything about histograms:

• Why do query optimizers need histograms
• What are the costs of collecting and maintaining a …

Want to get your web development ideas in front of a live audience? The
call for papers for the ConFoo Vancouver 2017 web developer conference is open! If you have
a burning desire to hold forth about PHP, databases, JavaScript, or any
other web development topics, we want to see your proposals. The window is
open only from April 10 to May 8, 2017, so hurry. An added benefit: If your
proposal is selected and you live outside of the Vancouver area, we will
cover your travel and hotel.

You’ll have 45 minutes for the talk, with 35 minutes for your topic and
10 minutes for Q&A. We can’t wait to see your proposals!

Until the talks are picked, the price for the tickets will be at its
lowest. Once …

Welcome to another post in the series of Percona Live featured session blogs! In these blogs, we’ll highlight some of the session speakers that will be at this year’s Percona Live conference. We’ll also discuss how these sessions 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 session, we’ll meet Ilya Kosmodemiansky, CEO and Consultant of Data Egret. His session is Linux IO Internals for Database Administrators. Input/output performance problems are an …

Introduction Dealing with time zones is always challenging. As a rule of thumb, it’s much easier if all date/time values are stored in the UTC format, and, if necessary, dealing with time zone conversations in the UI only. This article is going to demonstrate how you can accomplish this task with JDBC and the awesome … Continue reading How to store date, time, and timestamps in UTC time zone with JDBC and Hibernate →

In this blog post, I’ll look for the bottleneck that prevented the performance in my previous post from achieving better results.

The powerful machine I used in the tests in my previous post has a comparatively slow disk, and therefore I expected my tests would hit a point when I couldn’t increase performance further due to the disk speed.

Hardware configuration:

Processors: physical = 4, cores = 72, virtual = 144, hyperthreading = yes
Memory: 3.0T
Disk speed: about 3K …