Personal blog of Yzmir Ramirez

 Chinese tech conglomerate Tencent will be opening a new AI research center in Seattle, according to The Information. The company has long had a core office in Palo Alto, but this will be its first major machine intelligence R&D effort in the country. Earlier this week Tencent announced that it would open its first data center in Silicon Valley. Read More

 Rubrik, a startup that provides data backup and recovery services for enterprises across both cloud and on-premises environments, has closed a $180 million round of funding that values the company at $1.3 billion. The news confirms a report we ran earlier this week noting that the company was raising between $150 million and $200 million. Read More

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 MySQL Replication, the Community Sceptic Roundup, Open Source Monitoring for MySQL and MongoDB with Grafana and Prometheus, MyRocks Deep Dive: Flash Optimized LSM Database for MySQL, and its Use Case at Facebook and Hands-On Test Drive: MySQL on Ceph.
• An outstanding and fun Welcome Reception sponsored by Booking.com.
• Excellent keynote speeches such as SQLite: The Most Important Software Component That Many People Have Never Heard Of, The Open Source Database Business Model is Under Siege, The Future Of Monitoring Is Distributed, Monitoring Booking.com without looking at MySQL and Continuent is back! But what does Continuent do Anyway?
• A great Networking Reception in Expo Hall, where everyone met, mingled and made merry.
• The community dinner hosted and sponsored by Pythian

Thanks to Our Sponsors!

We would like to thank all of our valuable event sponsors, especially our diamond sponsors Continuent and VividCortex – your participation really makes the show happen.

We have developed multiple sponsorship options to allow participation at a level that best meets your partnering needs. Our goal is to create a significant opportunity for our partners to interact with Percona customers, other partners and community members. Sponsorship opportunities are available for Percona Live Europe 2017.

Download a prospectus here.

Percona Live Europe 2017: Dublin, Ireland!

This year’s Percona Live Europe will take place September 25th-27th, 2017, in Dublin, Ireland. Put it on your calendar now! Information on speakers, talks, sponsorship and registration will be available in the coming months.

We look forward to seeing you there!

 After pricing its IPO at $15 per share, Cloudera, the enterprise big data company, closed the day up more than 20 percent, at $18.09. This also is above the range of $12 to $14 for which Cloudera was preparing. Read More

 Welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture-capital focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the narrative. Homebrew’s own Hunter Walk joined us for this episode along with co-hosts Katie Roof, Matthew Lynley and myself. This week has been a delightful clown car of technology earnings, so we dove into Twitter’s surprisingly strong report that drove its share… Read More

 An early player in drone-tech, 3D Robotics Inc. on Thursday announced that it has raised $53 million in a Series D round of funding, including new equity funding and conversion of debt equity. Atlantic Bridge led the round, joined by Autodesk Forge Fund, True Ventures, Foundry Group, Mayfield and other undisclosed investors, according to the company statement. Read More

So that is just about a wrap here at Percona Live 2017 – except for the closing comments and prize giveaway. Before we leave, I have one more session to highlight: Facebook’s Beringei.

Beringei is Facebook’s open source, in-memory time series database. Justin Teller, Engineering Manager at Facebook, presented the session. According to Justin, large-scale monitoring systems cannot handle large-scale analysis in real time because the query performance is too slow. After evaluating and rejecting several disk-based and existing in-memory cache solutions, Facebook turned their attention to writing their own in-memory TSDB to power the health and performance monitoring system at Facebook. They presented “Gorilla: A Fast, Scalable, In-Memory Time Series Database (http://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol8/p1816-teller.pdf)” at VLDB 2015.

In December 2016, they open sourced the majority of that work with Beringei (https://github.com/facebookincubator/beringei). In this talk, Justin started by presenting how Facebook uses this database to serve production monitoring workloads at Facebook, with an overview of how they use it as the basis for a disaster-ready, high-performance distributed system. He closed by presenting some new performance analysis comparing (favorably) Beringei to Prometheus. Prometheus is an open source TSDB whose time series compression was inspired by the Gorilla VLDB paper and has similar compression behavior.

After the talk, Justin was kind enough to speak briefly with me. Check it out:

It’s been a great conference, and we’re looking forward to seeing you all at Percona Live Europe!

The place is still frantic here at Percona Live 2017 as everybody tries to squeeze in a few more talks before the end of the day. One such talk was given by Red Hat’s Stefan Negrea on Hawkular Metrics.

Hawkular Metrics is a scalable, long-term, high-performance storage engine for metric data. The session was an overview of the project that includes the history of the project, an overview of the Hawkular ecosystem, technical details of the project, developer features and APIs and third party integrations.

Stefan was kind enough to speak with me after the talk. Check it out below:

There are more talks today. Check out Thursday’s schedule here. Don’t forget to attend the Closing Remarks and prize give away at 4:00 pm.

 Microsoft just reported earnings for the last quarter. The company reported non-GAAP revenue of $23.6 billion and non-GAAP earnings per share of $0.73. Wall Street’s cadre of crack analysts expected the company’s earnings per share to come in at around $0.70, with revenue hitting about $23.6 billion. In the year-ago quarter, Microsoft reported earnings per share of $0.62. Wall… Read More

The last day of Percona Live 2017 is still going strong, with talks all the way until 4:00 pm (and closing remarks and a prize giveaway on the main stage then). I’m going to a few more sessions today, including one from Stephane Combaudon from Slice Technologies: Lessons learned while automating MySQL deployments in the AWS Cloud.

In this talk, Stephane discussed how automating deployments is a key success factor in the cloud. It is actually a great way to leverage the flexibility of the cloud. But often while automation is not too difficult for application code, it is much harder for databases. When Slice started automating their MySQL servers at Slice, they chose simple and production-proven components: Chef to deploy files, MHA for high availability and Percona XtraBackup for backups. But they faced several problems very quickly:

• How do you maintain an updated list of MySQL servers in the MHA configuration when servers can be automatically stopped or started?
• How can you coordinate your servers for them to know that they need to be configured as a master or as a replica?
• How do you write complex logic with Chef without being trapped with Chef’s two pass model?
• How can you handle clusters with different MySQL versions, or a single cluster where all members do not use the same MySQL version?
• How can you get reasonable backup and restore time when the dataset is over 1TB and the backups are stored on S3?

This session discussed the errors Slice made, and the solutions they found while tackling MySQL automation.

Stephane was kind enough to let me speak with him after the talk: check it out below:

There are more talks today. Check out Thursday’s schedule here. Don’t forget to attend the Closing Remarks and prize give away at 4:00 pm.