Percona Live Europe Amsterdam Day 1 was a bunch of fun, especially since I didn’t have to give a talk or anything since my tutorial was over on Day 0.
At lunch, I realised that there are a lot more fringe events happening around Percona Live… and if you’ve seen how people do “tech weeks”, maybe this is what the event ends up being – a show, plus plenty of focused satellite events. FOSDEM in the open source world totally gets this, and best of all, also lists fringe events (see example from 2019).
So, Thursday evening gets a few fringe events, a relatively short train ride away:
Anyway, what was Day 1 like? Keynotes started the morning, and I did make a Twitter thread. It is clear that there is a lot of talk amongst companies that make open source software, and companies in the ecosystem that somehow also derive great value from it. Some look at this as the great cloud vendors vs open source software vendors debate, but this isn’t necessarily always the case – we’ve seen this as Percona’s model too. And we’ve seen cloud companies contribute back (again, just like Percona). Guess this is a topic for a different post, because there are always two sides to this situation…
It is also clear that people want permissive open source licenses over anything source available. If you’re a CxO looking for software, it would be almost irresponsible to be using critical software that is just source available with a proprietary license. After all, what happens when the company decides to ask for more money? (Companies change ownership too, you know).
It is probably clear the best strategies are the “multi” (or hybrid) strategies. Multiple databases, multiple clouds, and going all in on open source to avoid vendor lock-in. Of course, don’t forget that open source software also can have “vendor lock-in” – always look at the health metrics of a project, vs. a product. We’re lucky in the MySQL ecosystem that we have not just the excellent work of Oracle, but also MariaDB Corporation / MariaDB Foundation and also Percona.
MySQL 8.0 adoption is taking off, with about 26% of the users on it. Those on MySQL 5.6 still seem to be on it, and there has been a decrease in 5.7 use to grow that 8.0 pie. It isn’t clear how these stats are generated (since there is no “phone home” functionality in MySQL; also the MariaDB Server variant doesn’t get as much usage as one would like), but maybe it is via download numbers?
Anyone paying any attention to MySQL 8 will know that they have switched to a “continuous delivery model”, also known as, you get new features in every point release. So the latest 8.0.18 gets EXPLAIN ANALYZE, and while we can’t try it yet (not released, and the documentation isn’t updated), I expect it will be fairly soon. I am eager to try this, because MariaDB Server has had ANALYZE since 10.1 (GA – Oct 2015). And it wasn’t long ago that MySQL received CHECK constraints support (8.0.16). Also the CLONE plugin in 8.0.17 warrants some checking/usage!
Besides all the hallway chats and meetings I did manage to get into a few sessions… Rakuten Intelligence talked about their usage of ProxySQL, and one thing was interesting with regard to their future plans slide – they do consider group replication but they wonder what would replace their custom HA software? But most importantly they wonder if it is stable and which companies have successfully deployed it, because they don’t want to be the first. Question from the floor about Galera Cluster came up, and they said they had one app that required XA support – looks like something to consider once Galera 4 is fully baked!
The PXC–8 talk was also chock full of information, delivered excellently, and something to try soon (it wasn’t quite available yesterday, but today I see a release announcement: Experimental Binary of Percona XtraDB Cluster 8.0).
I enjoyed the OpenCorporates use case at the end too. From the fact that for them, being on-premise would be cheaper than the cloud, how they use ProxySQL, Galera Cluster branch Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC), and ZFS. ZFS is not the most common filesystem for MySQL deployments, so it was interesting to see what could be achieved.
Then there was the Booking.com party and boy, did they outdo themselves. We had a menu, multi-course meal with wine pairings, and a lot of good conversation. A night wouldn’t be complete without some Salmiakkikossu, and Monty sent some over for us to enjoy.
Food at the Hilton has been great too (something I would never really want to say, considering I’m not a fan of the hotel chain) – even the coffee breaks are well catered for. I think maybe this has been the best Percona Live in terms of catering, and I’ve been to a lot of them (maybe all…). I have to give much kudos to Bronwyn and Lorraine at Percona for the impeccable organisation. The WiFi works a charm as well. On towards Day 2!
