One for the road…

The social events at Percona Live Europe provide the community with more time to catch up with old friends and make new contacts. The formal sessions provided lots of opportunities for exchanging notes, experiences and ideas. Lunches and coffee breaks proved to be busy too. Even so, what’s better than chilling out over a beer or two (we were in Dublin after all) and enjoying the city nightlife in good company?

Percona Live Europe made it easy for us to get together each evening.  A welcome reception (after tutorials) at Sinnott’s Pub in the heart of the City hosted a lively crowd. The Community Dinner at the Mercantile Bar, another lively city center hostelry, was a sell-out. While our closing reception was held at the conference venue, which had proven to be an excellent base. 

Many delegates took the chance to enjoy the best of Dublin’s hospitality late into the night. It’s credit to their stamina – and the fantastic conference agenda – that opening keynotes on both Tuesday and Wednesday were very well attended.

In case you think we might have been prioritizing the Guinness, though, there was the little matter of the lightning talks at the Community Dinner. Seven community-minded generous souls gave up some of their valuable socializing time to share insights into matters open source. Thank you again to Renato Losio of Funambol, Anirban Rahut of Facebook, Federico Razzoli of Catawiki, Dana Van Aken of Carnegie Mellon University, Toshaan Bharvani of VanTosh, Balys Kriksciunas of Hostinger International and Vishal Loel of Lazada.

More about the lightning talks can be seen on the Percona Live Europe website.

Many of the conference treats – coffee, cakes, community dinner – are sponsored and thanks are due once more to our sponsors who helped make Percona Live Europe the worthwhile, enjoyable event that it was.

And so Percona Live Europe drew to a close. Delegates from 43 countries headed home armed with new knowledge, new ideas and new friends. I’ve put together to give a taste of the Percona Live social meetups in this video. Tempted to join us in 2018?

Sláinte!

Welcome to another post our series of interview blogs for the upcoming Percona Live Europe 2017 in Dublin. This series highlights a number of talks that will be at the conference and gives a short preview of what attendees can expect to learn from the presenter.

This blog post is with Balazs Pocze, Senior Datastore Engineer at Gizmodo. His talk is titled Migrating To and Living on RDS/Aurora. Gizmodo migrated their platform (Kinja) from a datacenter-based approach to AWS, including the migration of standalone MySQL hosts to RDS/Aurora. In our conversation, we discussed how they achieved this migration:

Percona: How did you get into database technology? What do you love about it?

Balazs: I worked as an Operations/DevOps guy for years before I started working with databases. I guess it happened because I was the person at the company that I worked at the time who dared to deal with the database when something strange happened. Somebody had to hold the hot potato.

I love that being a DBA is like being a bass player in a rock band. When you do your job perfectly, no one ever notices you are there – but the entire show depends on your work.

Percona: You’re presenting a session called “Migrating To and Living on RDS/Aurora”. What reasons were crucial in the decision to migrate to a cloud platform? Performance? Less management? Database demands?

Balazs: Actually, we migrated the entire Kinja (our platform) to the cloud, so migrating the database wasn’t a question for a second. We moved to the cloud because we didn’t want to deal with hardware anyway, we need flexibility. In the data center days, we had to size the DC’s to handle all of our traffic at any given moment. This means we had to burn a lot of money on underutilized machines. In the cloud, we can spin up machines when we need more computing power. In conjunction, our hardware just got old enough so that it made sense to consider what was a better idea: buying lots of expensive hardware, keep it running, dealing with the hardware (the majority of the ops team lives on a different continent than our servers!) or simply migrating everything to the cloud. That was simpler and safer.

But we didn’t just migrate to the cloud, we also migrated to RDS – managed database service instead of servers with a database on them. The reason to start using RDS was that I didn’t want to re-implement all of the automation stacks we had on the data centers. That seemed like too much work with too many points of failure. When I checked how to fix those failure points, the entire project started to look like the Deathstar. The original database stack was growing organically in the given data center scenario, and reimplementing it for the cloud seemed unsafe.

Percona: How smoothly was the transition, and did you hit unexpected complications? How did you overcome them?

Balazs: The transition was smooth and, from our reader’s view, unnoticeable. Since the majority of my talk will be about those complications and the ways we solved them, I think it would be best if I answer this question during my session.

But there’s a non-exhaustive list: we had to switch back from GTID to old-fashioned replication, we had to set up SSL proxies to connect securely the data center and the cloud environment, and after we had to debug a lot of packet loss and TCP overload on the VPN channel. It was fun, actually.

Percona: What do you want attendees to take away from your session? Why should they attend?

Balazs: This session will be about how we had to change our view of the database, and what differences we met in the cloud compared to the hardware world. If somebody plans to migrate to the cloud (especially AWS/RDS), I recommend they check out my talk, because some of the paths we walked down were dead ends. I’ll share what we found, so you don’t have to make the same mistakes we did. It will spare you some time.

Percona: What are you most looking forward to at Percona Live Europe 2017?

Balazs: Three things: hearing about new technologies, learning best practices, and most importantly meeting up with the people I always meet at Percona conferences. There is a really good community with lots of great people. I am always looking forward to seeing them again.

Want to find out more about Balazs and RDS migration? Register for Percona Live Europe 2017, and see his talk Migrating To and Living on RDS/Aurora. Register now to get the best price! Use discount code SeeMeSpeakPLE17 to get 10% off your registration.

Percona Live Open Source Database Conference Europe 2017 in Dublin is the premier European open source event for the data performance ecosystem. It is the place to be for the open source community as well as businesses that thrive in the MySQL, MariaDB, MongoDB, time series database, cloud, big data and Internet of Things (IoT) marketplaces. Attendees include DBAs, sysadmins, developers, architects, CTOs, CEOs, and vendors from around the world.

The Percona Live Open Source Database Conference Europe will be September 25-27, 2017 at the Radisson Blu Royal Hotel, Dublin.

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 colin.charles@percona.com.

We have some exciting keynotes as well. Some highlights:

1. MySQL as a Layered Service: How to Use ProxySQL to Control Traffic and Scale Out, given by René Cannaò, the creator of ProxySQL
2. Why Open Sourcing Our Database Tooling was the Smart Decision, given by Shlomi Noach, creator of Orchestrator, many other tools, and developer at GitHub (so expect some talk about gh-ost)
3. MyRocks at Facebook and a Roadmap, given by Yoshinori Matsunobu, shepherd of the MyRocks project at Facebook
4. Real Time DNS Analytics at CloudFlare with ClickHouse, given by Tom Arnfeld
5. Prometheus for Monitoring Metrics, given by Brian Brazil, core developer of Prometheus
6. A Q&A session with Charity Majors and Laine Campbell on Database Reliability Engineering, their new upcoming book!

Let’s not forget the usual State of the Dolphin, an update from Oracle’s MySQL team (representative: Geir Høydalsvik), as well as a keynote by Peter Zaitsev (CEO, Percona) and Continuent. There will also be a couple of Percona customers keynoting, so expect information-packed fun mornings! You can see more details about the keynotes here: day one and day two.

Releases

• Tarantool 1.7.5 stable. The first in the 1.7 series that comes as stable, and it also comes with its own Log Structured Merge Tree (LSM) engine called Vinyl. They wrote this when they found RocksDB insufficient for them. Slides: Vinyl: why we wrote our own write-optimized storage engine rather than chose RocksDB (and check out the video).
• MariaDB Server 10.2.8. A– as per my previous column, this build merges TokuDB from Percona Server 5.6.36-82.1 (fixing some bugs). There is also a new InnoDB from MySQL 5.7.19 (current GA release). Have you tried MariaDB Backup yet? There are some GIS compatibility fixes (i.e., to make it behave like MySQL 5.7). One thing that piqued my interest is the CONNECT storage engine (typically used for ETL operations) now has beta support for the MONGO table type. No surprises, it’s meant to read MongoDB tables via the MongoDB C Driver API. Definitely something to try!

Link List

• Comparing high availability for Google Cloud SQL and Amazon RDS by Preetam Jinka. Focuses only on Google Cloud SQL and Amazon AWS RDS (so new entrants like Microsoft, or even stalwarts like Rackspace are missing from this comparison). Come to Percona Live Dublin and listen to the talk Microsoft Loves MySQL and PostgreSQL to find out more about their new offering!
• Fun with Bugs #55 – On Some Public Bugs Fixed in MySQL 8.0.2. Valeriy Kravchuk looks at MySQL 8.0.2 bugs, and makes the statement “Percona seems to care a lot about improving MySQL 8.0 (as well as other Oracle MySQL GA versions).” He’s right, Percona really does care about making MySQL better.
• MyRocks my.cnf changes from June 16 to Aug 15. Mark Callaghan record of changes, and it’s important if you’re playing around with MyRocks.
• LDAP with auth_pam and PHP to authenticate against MySQL. Sheeri Cabral tells you how to use Percona’s PAM authentication plugin with PHP (so compiling php-cli).
• Creating better disaster recovery plan. Five questions for Tanya Reilly, Site Reliability Engineer at Google, who shares her thoughts on how to make better disaster recovery plans.

Upcoming Appearances

Percona’s website keeps track of community events, so check out where to listen to a Perconian speak. My upcoming appearances are:

1. db tech show case Tokyo 2017 – 5-7 September 2017, Tokyo, Japan
2. Open Source Summit North America – 11-14 September 2017, Los Angeles, CA, USA
3. Percona Live Europe Dublin – 25-27 September 2017, Dublin, Ireland
4. Velocity Europe – 17-20 October 2017, London, UK
5. Open Source Summit Europe – 23-26 October 2017, Prague, Czech Republic

Feedback

Bill Bogasky (MariaDB Corporation) says that if you’re looking for commercial support for Riak now that Basho has gone under, you could get it from Erlang Solutions or TI Tokyo. See their announcement: Riak commercial support now available post-Basho. Thanks, Bill!

I look forward to feedback/tips via e-mail at colin.charles@percona.com or on Twitter @bytebot.

We are excited to announce that the sneak peek schedule for the Percona Live Open Source Database Conference Europe 2017 is up! The Percona Live Open Source Database Conference Europe 2017 is September 25 – 27, at the Radisson Blu Royal Hotel.

The theme of Percona Live Europe 2017 is Championing Open Source Databases, with sessions on MySQL, MariaDB, MongoDB and other open source database technologies, including time series databases, PostgreSQL and RocksDB. This year’s conference will feature one day of tutorials and two days of keynote talks and breakout sessions related to open source databases and software. Tackling subjects such as analytics, architecture and design, security, operations, scalability and performance, Percona Live Europe provides in-depth discussions for your high-availability, IoT, cloud, big data and other changing business needs.

Below are some of our top picks for MySQL, MongoDB and open source database sessions:

Tutorials

• Hands-On ProxySQL
  Rene Cannao (ProxySQL), David Turner (Uber)
• MySQL Operations in Docker
  Giuseppe Maxia (VMware)
• Practical Orchestrator Tutorial
  Shlomi Noach (GitHub)

Breakout Talks

MySQL:

• How to Use MySQL in the Cloud
  Lixun Peng (Alibaba Cloud)
• A Quick Tour of MySQL 8.0 Roles
  Giuseppe Maxia (VMware)
• Introduction to MySQL InnoDB Cluster
  Frederic Descamps (Oracle)
• MySQL Infrastructure Testing Automation at GitHub
  Shlomi Noach (GitHub), Tom Krouper (GitHub)
• MySQL Security: Granting Secure Temporary Access with Vault
  Walter Heck (OlinData)
• InnoDB Locking Demystified
  Jan Lindström (MariaDB)

MongoDB:

• High-Performance JSON: PostgreSQL Vs. MongoDB
  Wei Shan Ang (GlobalSign), Dominic Dwyer (GlobalSign)
• Improve MongoDB Replication and Reduce Competition Between User Queries
  Xin Liu (Alibaba)
• Improvements to MongoRocks in 2017
  Mark Callaghan (Facebook)
• NoSQL Best Practices for PostgreSQL
  Dmitry Dolgov (Zalando SE)
• Migrating To and Living on RDS/Aurora
  Balazs Pocze (Gizmodo)
• RocksDB Static Sorted Table (SST) Formats: Considerations When Building a Search Engine
  Tarek Sheasha (Booking.com)
• What’s New in CMongo Tencent’s Branch of MongoDB
  Deyu Kong (Tencent)

Other Open Source Database Topics:

• Database Reliability Engineering: What, Why and How?
  Laine Campbell (Fastly)
• Visualize Your Data with Grafana
  Daniel Lee (Grafana Labs)
• Migrating to Vitess at (Slack) Scale
  Michael Demmer (Slack)
• Gh-ost: Triggerless, Painless, Trusted Online Schema Migrations
  Jonah Berquist (GitHub)
• How to Backup at Petabyte Scale When Every Transaction Counts
  Karoly Nagy (Dropbox)
• Automatic Database Management System Tuning Through Large-Scale Machine Learning
  Dana Van Aken (Carnegie Mellon University)
• Elasticsearch (R)Evolution – You Know, for Search…
  Philipp Krenn (Elastic)
• Evolution of the Prometheus TSDB
  Brian Brazil (Robust Perception)

Registration Prices Increase August 9, 2017 – Get Tickets Now for the Best Price!

Just a reminder to everyone out there that the Early Bird discount rate for the Percona Live Open Source Database Conference Europe 2017 ends August 8! The price increases as of August 9, so buy now. The Early Bird rate gets you all the excellent and amazing opportunities that Percona Live Europe offers, at a very reasonable price! Get your tickets as soon as possible for the best price.

Percona Live Europe 2017 Open Source Database Conference will be held at the Radisson Blu Royal Hotel, at Golden Lane 8, Dublin, Ireland.

The Radisson Blu Royal Hotel is a prime location in the heart of Dublin. Enjoy this spacious venue with complementary WiFi, expert on-site staff and three great restaurants offering a wide variety of meals. Staying for a couple extra days? Take time to enjoy the different tourist attractions, like traditional beer pubs and XII century castles, located minutes away.

A special hotel rate of EUR 250.00 is available for Percona Live Europe 2017 until August 14, 2017.

You can reserve a room by booking through the Radisson Blu’s reservation site.

1. Click BOOK NOW at the top right.
2. Enter your preferred check-in and check-out dates, and how many rooms.
3. From the drop-down “Select Rate Type,” choose Promotional Code.
4. Enter the code PERCON to get the discount

This special deal includes breakfast each morning! The group rate only applies if used within the Percona Live Europe group block dates (September 25-27, 2017).

Sponsor Percona Live

Become a conference sponsor! We have sponsorship opportunities available for this annual MySQL, MongoDB and open source database event. Sponsors become a part of a dynamic and growing ecosystem and interact with hundreds of DBAs, sysadmins, developers, CTOs, CEOs, business managers, technology evangelists, solutions vendors, and entrepreneurs who attend the event.

We are extending the Percona Live Open Source Database Conference Europe 2017 call for papers deadline to Monday, July 24, 2017. Get your submissions in now!

Between our Conference Committee working hard to review all the outstanding talk ideas, and the many community requests for more time, we didn’t want to shortchange any of our applicants. If you procrastinated too long, didn’t complete your talk submission or just plain forgot to submit, this is your reprieve! You have one extra week to pull together a proposal for a talk on open source databases at Percona Live Europe 2017.

The theme of Percona Live Europe 2017 is “Championing Open Source Databases.” There are sessions on MySQL, MariaDB, MongoDB and Other Open Source Database technologies, including time series databases, PostgreSQL and RocksDB. Are you:

• Working with MongoDB as a developer?
• Creating a new MySQL-variant time series database?
• Deploying MariaDB in a novel way?
• Using open source database technology to solve a business issue?

Share your open source database experiences with peers and professionals in the open source community! We invite you to submit your speaking proposal for breakout, tutorial or lightning talk sessions:

• Breakout Session. Broadly cover a technology area using specific examples. Sessions should be either 25 minutes or 50 minutes in length (including Q&A).
• Tutorial Session. Present a technical session that aims for a level between a training class and a conference breakout session. Encourage attendees to bring and use laptops for working on detailed and hands-on presentations. Tutorials will be three or six hours in length (including Q&A).
• Lightning Talk. Give a five-minute presentation focusing on one key point that interests the open source community: technical, lighthearted or entertaining talks on new ideas, a successful project, a cautionary story, a quick tip or demonstration.

Submit your talk ideas now.

PLEASE NOTE: We have a new call for papers system that requires everyone to register for a new account. You can save proposals as drafts and edit them later. Once a proposal is submitted, it is final. You can NOT change a proposal once submitted.

Register for Percona Live Europe 2017 now! Early Bird registration lasts until August 8

Last year’s Percona Live Europe sold out, and we’re looking to do the same at this year’s conference. Don’t miss your chance to get your ticket at its most affordable price. Click here to register.

Percona Live 2017 sponsorship opportunities are available now

Percona Live Europe 2017 is just around the corner. Have you secured your sponsorship yet? Last year’s event sold out! Booth selection for our limited sponsorship opportunities is on a first-come, first-served basis. Click here to find out how to sponsor.

Don’t miss out on a special room rate at the Percona Live Europe 2017 venue

This year, Percona Live Europe is being held at the Radisson Blu Royal Hotel, Dublin. You can get a special room rate when you attend the conference. But hurry, rooms are going fast! To get the special room rate:

1. Visit https://www.radissonblu.com/en/royalhotel-dublin.
2. Click BOOK NOW at the top right.
3. Enter your preferred check-in and check-out dates, and how many rooms.
4. From the drop-down “Select Rate Type,” choose Promotional Code.
5. Enter the code PERCON to get the discount.

This special deal includes breakfast each morning! The group rate only applies if used within the Percona Live Europe group block dates (September 25-27, 2017). The deadline for booking with this rate is July 24, 2017.

This blog shows Peter Zaitsev’s speaking schedule for this summer.

Summer 2017 Speaking Engagements

This week I spoke at the DB Tech Showcase OSS conference in Japan and am now heading to Europe. I have a busy schedule in June and early July, but there are events and places where we can cross paths and have a quick conversation. Let’s meet at these events if you need anything from Percona (or me personally). 

Below is a full list of places I’ll be at this summer:

Amsterdam, Netherlands

On June 20 I am speaking at the In-Memory Computing Summit 2017 with Denis Magda (Product Manager, Gridgain Systems). Our talk “Accelerate MySQL® for Demanding OLAP and OLTP Use Cases with Apache® Ignite™” starts at 2:35 pm.

On the same day in Amsterdam, Denis and I will speak at the local MySQL User Group meetup. I will share some how-tos for MySQL monitoring with Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM), along with a PMM demo.

Ghent, Belgium

On June 22 we are organizing a Percona University event in Ghent, Belgium, which is a widely known tech hub in the region. I will give several talks there on MySQL, MongoDB and PMM monitoring. Dimitri Vanoverbeke from Percona will discuss MySQL in the Cloud. We have also invited guest speakers: Frederic Descamps from Oracle, and Julien Pivotto from Inuits.

Percona University technical events are 100% free to attend, and so far we are getting very positive attendee feedback on them. To check the full agenda for the Belgium edition, and to register, please use this link.

St. Petersburg, Russia

Percona is sponsoring PG Day’17 Russia, the PostgreSQL conference. This year they added a track on open source databases (and I was happy to be their Committee member for the OSDB track). The conference starts on July 5, and on that day I will give a tutorial on InnoDB Architecture and Performance Optimization. Sveta Smirnova will also present a tutorial on MySQL Performance Troubleshooting.

On July 6-7, you can expect four more talks given by Perconians at PG Day. We invite you to stop by our booth (“Percona”) and ask us any tough questions you might have.

Moscow, Russia

On July 11 I will speak at a Moscow MySQL User Group meetup at the Mail.Ru Group office. While we’re still locking down the agenda, we always have a great selection of speakers at the MMUG meetups. Make sure you don’t miss this gathering!

Thank you, and I hope to see many of you at these events.

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 the folks at SelectStar, a database monitoring and management tool company. SelectStar will be a sponsor at Percona Live this year.

I recently came across the SelectStar database monitoring product. There are a number of monitoring products on the market (with the evolution of various SaaS and on-premises solutions), but SelectStar piqued my interest for a few reasons. I had a chance to speak with Cameron Jones, Principal Product Manager at SelectStar about their tool:

Percona: What are the challenges that lead to developing SelectStar?

Cameron: One of the challenges that we’ve found in the database monitoring and management sector comes from the dilution of the database market – and not in a bad way. Traditional, closed source database solutions continue to be used across the board (especially by large enterprises), but open source options like MySQL, MongoDB, PostgreSQL and Elasticsearch continue to gain traction as organizations seek solutions that meet their demand for agility and flexibility.

From a database monitoring perspective, this adds some challenges. Traditional solutions are focused on monitoring RDBMS and are really great at it, while newer solutions may only focus on one piece of the puzzle (NoSQL or cloud only, for example).

Percona: How does SelectStar compare to other monitoring and management tools?

Cameron: SelectStar covers a wide array of open and closed source database solutions and is easy to setup. This makes it ideal for enterprises that have a lot going on. Here is the matrix of supported products from our website:

Database Types	Key Metrics Monitored by SelectStar
Big Data Hadoop Cassandra	Ops Counters – Inserts, Queries, etc. Network Traffic Asserts Locks Memory Usage
Cloud Amazon Aurora Amazon Dynamo Amazon RDS Microsoft Azure	Queries Memory Usage Network CPU Balance IOPS
NoSQL MongoDB	Ops Counters – Inserts, Queries, etc. Network Traffic Asserts Locks Memory Usage
Open Source PostgreSQL MongoDB MySQL MariaDB	Average Query Execution Time Query Executions Memory Usage Wait Time
Traditional RDBMS IBM DB2 MS SQL Server Oracle	Average Query Execution Time Query Executions Memory Usage Wait Time

In addition to monitoring key metrics for different database types, one of the key differences with SelectStar came from its comprehensive alerts and recommendations system.

The alerts and recommendations are designed to ensure you have an immediate understanding of key issues – and where they are coming from. MonYOG is great at this for MySQL, but lacks on other aspects. With SelectStar, you can pinpoint the exact database instance that may be causing the issue; or go further up the chain and see if it’s an issue impacting several database instances at the host level.

Recommendations are often tied to alerts – if you have a red alert, there’s going to be a recommendation tied to it on how you can improve. However, the recommendations pop up even if your database is completely healthy – ensuring that you have visibility into how you can improve your configuration before you actually have an issue impacting performance.

With insight into key metrics, alerts and recommendations, you can fine tune your database performance. In addition, it gives you the opportunity to become more proactive with your database monitoring.

Percona: Is configuring SelectStar difficult?

Cameron: SelectStar is easy to set up – in fact, most customers are up and running in 20 minutes.

Simply head over to the website – selectstar.io – and log in. From there, you’ll be greeted by a welcome screen where you can easily click through and configure a database.

To configure a database, you select your type:

And from there, set up your collector by inputting some key information.

And that’s it! As soon as it’s configured, the collector will start gathering information and data is populated within 20 minutes.

Percona: How does SelectStar work?

Cameron: Using agentless collectors, SelectStar gathers data from both your on-premises and AWS platforms so that you can have insight into all of your database instances.

The collector is basically an independent machine within your infrastructure that pulls data from your database. It is low impact so that it doesn’t impact performance. This is a different approach from all of the other monitoring tools.

Router Metrics (Shown Above)

Mongo relationship tree displaying router, databases, replica set, shards and nodes. (Shown Above)

Percona: Any final thoughts? What are you looking forward to at Percona Live?

Cameron: If you’re in the market for a new database monitoring solution, SelectStar is worth looking at because it covers a breadth of databases with the depth into key metrics, alerts and notifications that optimize performance across your databases. We have a free trial, so you have an easy option to try it. We’re looking forward to meeting with as much of the community as possible, getting feedback and hearing about people’s monitoring needs.

Register for Percona Live Data Performance Conference 2017, and meet the creators of SelectStar. You can find them at selectstar.io. Use the code FeaturedTalk and receive $100 off the current registration price!

Percona Live Data Performance Conference 2017 is the premier open source event for the data performance ecosystem. It is the place to be for the open source community, as well as businesses that thrive in the MySQL, NoSQL, cloud, big data and Internet of Things (IoT) marketplaces. Attendees include DBAs, sysadmins, developers, architects, CTOs, CEOs, and vendors from around the world.

The Percona Live Data Performance Conference will be April 24-27, 2017 at the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara & The Santa Clara Convention Center.

The countdown is on for the annual Percona Live Data Performance Conference and Expo in Europe! This year the conference will be taking place in the great city of Amsterdam September 21-23rd. This three day conference will focus on the latest trends, news and best practices in the MySQL, NoSQL and Data in the Cloud markets, while looking forward to what’s on the long-term horizon within the global Data Performance industry. With 84 breakout sessions, 8 tutorial sessions and 6 keynotes, including a Data in the Cloud keynote panel, there will certainly be no lack of content.
Advanced Rate Registration ENDS August 16th so make sure to register now to secure the best price possible.

As it is a Percona Live Conference, there will certainly be no lack of FUN either!!!!

As tradition holds, there will be a Community Dinner. Tuesday night, September 22, Percona Live Diamond Sponsor Booking.com will be hosting the Community Dinner of the year at their very own headquarters located in historic Rembrandt Square in the heart of the city. After breakout sessions conclude, attendees will be picked up right outside of the venue and taken to booking.com’s headquarters by canal boats! This gives all attendees the opportunity to play “tourist” while viewing the beauty of Amsterdam from the water. Attendees will be dropped off right next to Booking.com’s office! Come and show your support for the community while enjoying dinner and drinks! Space is limited so make sure to sign up ASAP!

So don’t forget, register for the conference and sign up for the community dinner before space is gone!
See you in Amsterdam!

The post Percona Live Amsterdam Discounted Pricing and Community Dinner! appeared first on MySQL Performance Blog.

Percona is proud to sponsor the 4th Drizzle Day, this year being held on the 13th April, the day after the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo.

When: Friday, April 13th 2012 from 9:30 am

Where: Cypress room, Mezzanine Level, Hyatt Regency Santa Clara (5101 Great America Parkway)

What: Drizzle Day is a day to learn about Drizzle, how to use Drizzle, migrating to Drizzle and contributing to Drizzle. If you’re interested in a database for modern web applications, relational databases being deployed in the cloud, advanced replication techniques (such as crash safe replication, multi-sourced replication and being able to consume the replication stream in your application), AlsoSQL (a HTTP interface to a relational database), testing and performance – then Drizzle day is for you!

Price: Admission is free, however the Drizzle team would love you to consider making a voluntary donation between 50 – 150 USD to our SPI account to cover for the costs of this conference: click here to donate. Note that if you are expensing your travel and Percona Live attendance with your employer anyway, you can also expense this payment as a conference fee.

Lunch: There are various options with different prices for lunch inside and outside of the Hyatt. We will provide coffee, tea, beverages and snacks inside the Cypress room both for morning and afternoon breaks. Please let us know of diet or allergy restrictions in your RSVP.

Registrations: Space is limited, so please RSVP right away to ensure you get a spot. RSVP at henrik@drizzle.org so we can plan the space and refreshments.

A draft schedule is on the Drizzle Day website.

I spent last week at linux.conf.au in Ballarat, Victoria (that’s the Victoria in Australia, not wherever else there may be one) which is only a pleasant two hour drive from my home town of Melbourne (Australia, not Florida). I sent an email internally to our experts detailing bits of the conference that may interest them – and I thought that it may also interest our wider readers who are interested in all levels of the software stack.

For those that don’t know: linux.conf.au is one of (if not the) most awesome technical conference in the free software space. It consistently attracts a wide variety of very knowledgable speakers and a large number of attendees.

Every year it is put together by a (different) set of volunteers, and this means it also tours around the country (and sometimes even New Zealand). This year it was in Ballarat – a regional city a couple of hours drive out of Melbourne. One of the great things about LCA is that you are not always at the same hotel, in the same city stuck with the same two restaurants.

This year had a bit of an increased focus on privacy, security and basic freedoms and human rights. This is no doubt a reaction to the increased attacks on freedom of speech and the internet that have been going on in recent months.

That being said, there were a huge number of great talks on a variety of topics – everything from filesystem performance to open hardware, to repurposing existing hardware to upcoming challenges for the kernel to howto be a better sysadmin. In fact… for those who weren’t there and spend any of their life helping people admin machines – go and watch those talks.

linux.conf.au (for me) is one of the cannot-miss events in the year. It’s an opportunity to learn things that directly apply to my work, may apply in the future and most certainly will never apply but are rather cool anyway.

All the video from the conference are already up! This is an amazing effort from the (volunteer) AV team. I’ve included links to a selection of talks below that I especially think are worth watching:

Watch no matter what:

• Keynote – Karen Sandler
  This keynote was amazing. Go watch it. The organisers did a truly excellent job at selecting keynotes this year.
• Keynote – Jacob Appelbaum
  This is best described as a tour of internet freedom, the attacks on it and a tour of the modern surveillance state.
• UEFI and Linux: The future is here and it’s awful
  You will be depressed at some point in this talk – the news is not great for the future of even being able to easily boot free software on machines.
• Paul Fenwick’s Keynote
  A good quick introduction to hacking your brain. I’m sure many of you (like me) are interested in ways to hack our brains and our bodies to better serve us. This talk is merely an introduction. I also suggest you check out Anki if you want to improve your ability to remember things.
• Torturing OpenSSL
  This was certainly one of the most amazing talks I saw. A whole new interesting way of attacking SSL. Vary CPU voltage, extract private SSL keys! Wheee!
• The Kernel Report – Jonathan Corbet
  You can skip this only if you read every single mail on LKML, run your own analysis on the kernel source tree and publish an (at least) weekly publication on Linux.
  This is one of the few (err… only) talks that is repeatedly accepted into linux.conf.au. Why? Because Jon manages to compress a whole year of activity in the Linux world int oa single session that is incredibly informative.
• I Can’t Believe This Is Butter! A tour of BTRFS
  This is going to be the default filesystem in a number of places over the next few years, time to start learning! While it’s unlikely to be suitable for database workloads anywhere in the near future, I suspect we’ll see BTRFS as the root filesystem and XFS as the filesystem for the database server in the not too distant future.
• Mistakes Were Made
  This session explores a number of rather indispensable things for those in operations – but also leaks over into development. Learning from our mistakes can only make us better at doing our jobs.
• Hack Everything: repurposing everyday devices
  This was great fun – reuse existing hardware to do awesome things!

Talks that could be quite interesting for you, depending on your interests:

• XFS: Recent and Future Adventures
  This talk covered a lot of the recent improvements in XFS. Especially interesting for those with metadata heavy workloads.
• Bloat: How and Why UNIX Grew Up (and Out) – Rusty Russell,Matt Evans
  This is a pretty neat examination of where bloat comes from taking V6 UNIX utilities as the baseline. It would be interesting to have a similar study on the database servers we all love and use.
• Migrating to PHP 5.4
  Probably quite useful if you’re dealing with PHP (although I wasn’t in this session).
• Finding vulnerabilities in PHP code (via static code analysis)
  This one is for our web developers. It’s only a 20minute talk, so you should really all go and watch it. Various static analysis tools are part of the normal toolkit for C and C++ development these days, it’s great to see people working on them for other languages.

Talks I shall be watching the videos of as I was in another talk at the time:

• Smashing a square peg into a round hole
• Codec2: Open Source Speech Codec
• Desktop Home Hacks
• This Old Code, or Renovating Dusty Old Open Source For Fun and Profit
  This is especially interesting as I both know Greg and have talked to him about this work *and* because of my experience with the Drizzle project – we certainly have encountered more than our fair share of dusty old code during our time working on Drizzle.
• Mentoring: we’re Doing It Wrong

My Talk:

• Multi-tenancy, multi-master, sharding, scaling and analytics with Drizzle
  An update as to what we’ve been working on getting going in Drizzle.

All the videos are going up at:

• http://www.youtube.com/user/linuxconfau2012/videos