Personal blog of Yzmir Ramirez

As I wrote in my invitation blog post, we got fortunate this year – Percona Live 2023 took place right after the Denver Marathon, which assembled us to put together a fantastic Database Runs event right before the conference.

Percona Staff, Conference Attendees, and local community members took part in this event, and we ran as four teams: MySQL, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, and MariaDB.

The Denver Marathon has more than 20,000 runners, and there were more than 1,000 Relay Teams (five members each) which makes for a fantastic run experience; there is always someone to chase, and there is always someone chasing you!

Weather also cooperated – while the day before and a couple of days after it was gloomy because of the forest, we had blue skies during our run.

Team PostgreSQL finished first, finishing #102, in the top 10% of all teams competing, which is a great result, considering so many of us were casual runners and also did not train at the “mile high” altitude of Denver. You can check other team results here by looking for the team number.

 

Percona Denver Relay Run May 2023

If you’re going to take on the second-highest peak in the lower 48 states, you might as well do it in great company. That’s precisely what we — Matthew Boehm, Michael Coburn, Péter Farkas, Jean-François Gagné, Marcin Gwóźdź, Kenny Gryp, Nando Laudares, and Alexander Rubin — decided to do. Fresh from attending Percona Live in Denver, we set off on a journey to conquer Mt Elbert, standing proud at 14,438′ (4400m).

We calculated that two nights at 10,000′ (3000m) would acclimatize us sufficiently for the thinner air on the mountain. We decided to take the Mt. Elbert Northeast Ridge Route as it offered the highest chance of a successful summit push, given the amount of snow still on the mountain.

Day 1: Acclimatization

After getting a good night’s sleep, we took breakfast at the Silver Llama, then on to picking up supplies. We headed to the local Safeway for bread, peanut butter, and jam. A few members who had rented equipment picked it up while the rest of us gathered at the hotel, prepping for our first experience on the Mt. Elbert Northeast Ridge trail. The trailhead started at 3075m, and we hiked to a max of 3584m, covering 9 km (5.6 miles) over four hours.

The locals seemed to be enjoying the weather and gladly accepted the food we offered.

The temperatures varied between 18°C to 31°C (64°F to 88°F), which made for a generally comfortable hike. Encountering substantial snow at the tree line, we tried on our snowshoes, breaking them in for the main hike.

As the day ended, we enjoyed the pizza from High Mountain Pies. Highly recommended!

Day 2: Summit Mt. Elbert

We gathered at 4:00 am in the hotel lobby and were on the trail by 4:45 am, our headlamps illuminating the path ahead. With the break of dawn around 5:30 am, we could finally switch off the headlamps and admire the trail in natural light.

As we ascended, we had some delightful encounters with local fauna:

We reached the summit in two separate teams, taking a group photo to capture this triumphant moment. Despite the chilly winds and the temperature being around 10°C (50°F), the clear skies provided perfect hiking conditions.

However, the descent proved to be a bit more challenging as ominous-looking clouds moved in, accompanied by sporadic thunder and lightning.

The rivers, despite the warmth in the afternoons, were peaceful and not overflowing their banks.

Friday’s journey had us walking 15 km (9.3 miles) for about nine hours, reaching the summit after five hours of climbing to 4400m (approx. 14,438 ft).

On behalf of the team, I would like to express my gratitude to Michelle Egan, Ella Boucaud, and the whole Percona Live team for ensuring we were organized throughout this adventure.

Also, we would like to share an exciting opportunity for adventurous souls. Peter Zaitsev is organizing a climb to the summit of Aconcagua, Argentina, in early 2024. To be part of this thrilling expedition, click here.

Percona Live will be held May 22nd through the 24th in Denver, Colorado. The first day, May 22nd, is devoted to tutorials. These tutorials are intense, high-quality sessions where you can learn new skills.  The list below is incomplete and may be re-arranged as schedules change.

The instructors are well-known professionals in the open source database communities, and this is your opportunity to learn from them.  The only downside?  Space is limited, and you must register as soon as possible for your choice of tutorials. 

• Getting Started with Group Replication – Matthew Boehm, Percona
• MySQL Architectures: Design the Right Solution for Your Needs – Frédéric Descamps, Oracle
• PostgreSQL Indexes demystified – Charly Batista, Percona
• Deploying MySQL on Kubernetes with the Percona Operator – Fernando Laudares Camargos, Percona
• Systematic performance analysis through PMM – Marcos Albe & Augustin Gallego, Percona
• Percona Xtrabackup: From Zero To Hero – Marcelo Altmann, Percona
• Unleashing PostgreSQL’s Power: Fine-Tuning for Maximum Performance in Read/Write/Read-Write Intensive Workloads – Ibrar Ahmed, Percona
• PMM Tutorial – Michael Coburn, Carlos Tutte, Ivan Groenewold, Francisco Bordenave, Percona
• Introduction to ClickHouse Tutorial – Alkin Tezuysal, Emrah Idman, ChistaDATA Inc
• The Gordian Knot, Successfully Upgrading PostGIS –  Robert Bernier, Percona

And please watch the Percona Live Website for additions to the list of tutorials and other updates.

 

Register for Percona Live

Sure, you ensure your database runs, but have you ever thought about running for your favorite database? You can do just that in Denver, Colorado, on Sunday, May 21, the day before Percona Live 2023 kicks off!

We’re partnering with the Denver Marathon to attract relay teams of five runners each who will complete legs of 3.9 to 6.5 miles (6 to 10 kilometers). We are recruiting runners for Team MySQL, Team MariaDB, Team PostgreSQL, and Team MongoDB.

Want to work with us to organize another team? Let us know!

In addition to putting it on the line for their beloved databases, Denver Marathon Relay participants get a T-shirt and special recognition during Percona Live 2023.

Denver Marathon Database Relay participation is free for Percona Live attendees. Space is limited, so apply as soon as possible by filling out this form.

Percona Live 2023 takes place in Denver, Colorado this year and with my love of mountains, I thought it would be a crime not to combine it with climbing one of the famous Colorado 14ers  (14,000ft+ in height).

So we’re putting a team together to climb Mt. Elbert — 14,440ft (4401m) — the highest mountain in Colorado and second highest in the lower 48 states (after Mt. Whitney). Even though it is the highest mountain in Colorado it is a rather easy climb (Class 1) and climbable year-round, so doing it in late May is doable, though some snow and ice are expected on the way.

We plan to have an acclimatization hike in the Mt. Elbert area on May 25th (the next day After Percona Live) and then do a summit attempt on May 26th early in the morning (around 4:30 am).  The weather tends to be worse in the afternoon and snow gets softer. The roundtrip climb should take 7-10 hours depending on the group’s fitness and trail condition.

Interested?  Please fill out this form to indicate your interest and we will get back to you with further details.

No previous mountain climbing experience is required, though you need to be in good physical fitness — enough to go up the hill for many mountains with a small backpack. There are no costs involved. You do not need to attend Percona Live to join us for this adventure, though we of course hope you do!

P.S. – Also check out the Climbing Pico de Orizaba blog post on my personal blog about my personal recent climbing experience (of a significantly harder mountain).

Percona Live 2023 will be in Denver Colorado May 22nd through the 24th. This is the premier open source database conference and you not only want to attend but you also need to present at!

We are seeking talks from all experience levels to share their expertise in either 50-minute or 3-hour tutorials. Topics can cover any and all open source database and data-related topics. Whether you are a MySQL, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, or a MariaDB expert, Percona Live has you covered! If Kubernetes, Cloud, observability, or DevOps your thing – we want you to! The deadline to submit is February 17th.

• • Breakout Sessions broadly cover a technology area using specific examples. Sessions should be up to 50 minutes in length (including Q&A)
  • Tutorial Sessions 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 3 hours in length (including Q&A).

?We want proposals that cover the many aspects of application development using all open source databases, as well as new and interesting ways to monitor and manage database environments.

Accepted speakers for Breakout Sessions and Tutorials receive a free full conference pass. We’ll also widely promote the conference, and share tips on how you can promote your confirmed, rock star speaker status!

Call For Papers

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If you are a first-time presenter or just want an extra set of eyes to look over your submissions, please do not hesitate to contact me or any of the other Developer Evangelists at Percona (DM @stoker on Twitter or email at David.Stokes@Percona.com. The audience is warm and receptive and really wants you to succeed. So come tell us about your experience implementing something, a new technical trend, or how you solved a problem.

And watch for notices on when tickets go on sale if you decide not to submit a session.

Call For Papers

Couldn’t make it to Austin this year for Percona Live? Don’t worry! We got you covered. 

This year’s show included 80+ sessions by leading open source database experts alongside big names like Shopify, Hubspot, Venmo, Amazon, and Facebook. And every session is available right now, on demand. 

Here are just a few of the sessions you can access right now. 

Database Incident Management: When Everything Goes Wrong

Speaker: Joshua Varner, Shopify

When database systems go down, the consequences are usually severe. And who’s the last line of defense protecting a company’s data? Database professionals. During this talk, Joshua Varner of Shopify discusses incident management practices that can help any DBA/DRE work as a team through the toughest of issues – even when the pressure is high. Joshua shares important tips that span the various stages of an incident – detection, alerting, response, postmortem, and prevention – as well as the unique challenges database teams face as compared to other disciplines.

Migrating Facebook/Meta to MySQL 8.0

Speakers: Herman Lee and Pradeep Nayak, FaceBook/Meta

MySQL powers some of Facebook/Meta’s most important workloads. Because the Facebook/Meta team actively develops new features in MySQL to support their evolving requirements, migrating workloads to majors versions requires significant time and effort. Their upgrade to version 5.6 took more than a year, and moving to 5.7 would have been no faster, as they were in the middle of developing their MyRocks storage engine. By MySQL 8.0, they had finished MyRocks and were ready to take advantage of that version’s compelling new features, like atomic DDL support. Even so, the migration would come with some tough challenges. In this talk, Herman Lee and Pradeep Nayak share how Facebook/Meta tackled their 8.0 migration project and some of the surprises they discovered along the way.

Percona Monitoring and Measuring (PMM) For Novices

Speaker: Dave Stokes, Percona

The use of open source databases comes with huge benefits like greater innovation, lower costs, liberal licensing, data portability, and the ability to extend the code. But how can you effectively monitor and manage your databases in the face of increasing complexity? Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) is an open source database observability, monitoring, and management tool for MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MongoDB. In this session, open source database expert Dave Stokes walks you through how to install PMM, how to register databases with it, and how to use it to simplify operations, optimize performance, and improve the security of your database services. Tune into this session to see how Dave starts at zero to make you a hero at monitoring your databases. 

Simplifying the Top Complexities While Migrating From Oracle to PostgreSQL

Speaker: Avinash Vallarapu, MigOps

Migrating from Oracle to PostgreSQL is complex and can seem like a risky and daunting task. It doesn’t have to be. In this talk, Avinash Vallarapu shows you how to simplify some of the major complexities that may occur when moving from Oracle to PostgreSQL. Specifically, he discusses and demos:

• Converting sysdate from Oracle to PostgreSQL. Among a variety of options available in Postgres, which one is correct?
• Converting Hierarchical Queries from Oracle to PostgreSQL. Is Recursive CTE a correct alternative?
• Understanding Internals of the available solutions.
• Implementing Associative Arrays in PostgreSQL.
• Understanding the correct alternatives for Oracle Array Indexes and other complexities.

Big Data…Or Just Too Much Data?

Speaker: Marcos Albe, Percona

Has your multi-terabyte MySQL instance become unmanageable? Are reporting queries taking longer and longer? Do backup storage costs keep increasing? Do simple queries take seconds to run? In this talk, Marcos Albe discusses the practical limits of MySQL, how to tame your data, and what the alternatives to MySQL are.

The Future of Percona Products

Speaker: Donnie Berkholz, Percona

Percona has long been a leader in the global open source community. As we head into the future, we’re excited to unveil our plans to help even more companies harness the benefits of open source databases. In this session, Donnie Berkholtz shares the Percona product roadmap for the next few years and makes a major announcement about Percona Platform. Whether you’re already using Percona software or services or considering it, you don’t want to miss this session.

MySQL Parallel Replication: All the 5.7 and 8.0 Details 9 (LOGICAL_CLOCK)

Speaker: Jean-François Gagné, HubSpot

Parallel Replication is an effective feature for achieving faster replication and reducing lag. While MySQL implements Parallel Replication through LOGICAL_CLOCK, fully benefiting from this mechanism requires more than just enabling it. In this talk, Jean-François Gagné covers important things you need to know about MySQL 5.7 and 8.0 Parallel Replication. He explains in detail how LOGICAL_CLOCK works and provides expert advice on how to optimize Parallel Replication in MySQL. He also discusses changes made in MySQL 8.0, and back-ported in 5.7, that greatly improve the potential for parallel execution on replicas. 

Deploying MongoDB Sharded Clusters Easily With Terraform and Ansible

Speaker : Ivan Groenewold, Percona

Installing big clusters can be a time-consuming task. In this talk, you’ll learn how to develop a complete pipeline to deploy MongoDB sharded clusters. By combining Terraform for the hardware provisioning and Ansible for the software installation, we can save time and provide a standardized reusable solution.

Sign up to see all Percona Live sessions

Learn from the best and brightest in the open source database industry. Watch these and other Percona Live 2022 sessions now.

 

Percona Live 2022 in Austin has just ended, but we don’t waste time and we’ve prepared a new event for you. We understand that traveling still might be challenging for both speakers and attendees, and that’s why the event will be virtual. It will take place on June 21 – 23 and will be streamed on YouTube, LinkedIn, and Twitch.

For this event, we invited speakers whose amazing talks we were not able to accommodate in the tight schedule of Percona Live, and also other fantastic speakers.

Good news – we still accept submissions from everyone! We are looking forward to hearing from you!  We welcome any talks related to open source technologies, MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, MariaDB databases, and new & emerging technologies. The CFP closes on Monday, May 31. Don’t hesitate and send your abstracts here now!

Here are some of the amazing talks that are already on the schedule:

• Flexible Indexing with Postgres by Bruce Momjian (Postgres Evangelist, EDB)
• PMM on Kubernetes by Denys Kondratenko (Director of Software Engineering, Percona)
• The Open-Source Distributed Graph Database: Nebula Graph by Wey Gu (Developer Advocate, Vesoft)
• 10 Deadly PostgreSQL Sins by Matt Yonkovit (HOSS, Percona) and Barrett Chambers (Director, Solutions Engineering, Percona)
• I Dropped My Database! Now What? – A Dive Into PostgreSQL Backup Using pgBackRest and How to Use it for PITR by Charly Batista (Postgres Tech Lead, Percona)
• The MySQL Ecosystem in 2022 by Colin Charles (Codership)
• The Ways of Performance Schema and How to Leverage it for Troubleshooting by Leonardo Bacchi Fernandes (Support Engineer, Percona)

And more!

If you are not ready to talk, we welcome you to join the event as an attendee. Just come to our streams on YouTube, LinkedIn, or Twitch. All the updates will be published on the event’s page. Also, follow us on Twitter so as to not to miss the important news.

Percona Live is about one month away and the schedule has a lot of content. But what are we missing?

Occasionally we have speakers who cannot make the event at the last minute or discover a room with an unused time slot.  So, if we had one of these speaking slots open up, what would you want to see presented?   What subject did we miss or not emphasize on the schedule that needs to be added?

This is your chance to tailor Percona Live to your needs.

Please let me know via email or in the comments before the show and I will pursue your suggestions.  And while I may not know someone who could present ‘Kubernetes Explained In Interpretive Dance’ or ‘GDPR Data Retention Issues for non-European Union Countries’, there is a chance that I can track down someone who does.

Do we need an hour (or so) on data normalization, scrubbing user input, ETL tools,  MongoDB indexing methodology, what’s new in distributed lock management, SQL syntax, or hybrid cloud management?  Sometimes we have no submissions on a subject and therefore have no content in the show but this time we may be able to arrange to get coverage on something missed.

Or are you in the ‘I missed the call for papers deadline and really want to present’ category?  Well, this just may be the last opportunity to speak in Austin for 2022.

We are also looking at presenting a virtual event in late June where we will repeat some of the Austin content and will have room for new content.  So please let me know what is lacking, what you want to learn about, maybe a speaker you would like to see, or some activity you want to be added to Percona Live or the virtual event.  Percona’s staff is pretty sharp at this database stuff but we are not perfect at knowing your needs.  This is your chance to let us know general areas that need emphasis (more beginners subjects or Kube?) to let us serve our community better.

Register for Percona Live

Percona Live is a jam-packed few days. There are over 100 sessions, covering a range of open source topics and featuring several tactical, hands-on demos. Obviously, you can’t attend every one of them, and parsing through the agenda can take some time.

That’s why we’ve compiled a list of what we’re calling “hot topic” sessions. These are the ones that are top-of-mind in the open source community and feature heavy-hitting speakers from Meta/Facebook, Venmo, Amazon, and, yes, Percona. They’re also the only sessions that are available for live streaming. 

Below, you’ll find the full list of “hot topic” sessions. And if you haven’t yet registered for Percona Live, the largest open source database conference in the world, head on over to our registration page. Just do it quickly – Percona Live is happening May 16th – 18th in Austin, TX. 

Tuesday, May 17, 2022

The Evolution of a MySQL Database: From a Single Instance to HA with Disaster Recovery, Frédéric Descamps, Oracle, 10:30 AM

This session discusses how to make the transition from a single MySQL instance to multi-site high availability, as well as which solutions are best suited to changing business requirements (RPO, RTO).  

MySQL Performance Diagnostic Using Percona PMM, Marcos Albe, Percona, 11:30 AM

In this session, we show how we use Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) at our Support department to systematically find the root cause of performance issues.  We will showcase our bottom-up approach, based on the U.S.E. method by Brendan Gregg, and will diagnose a live workload that the attendees themselves will have a chance to tweak during the presentation.

MariaDB Scaling – From Single Instance to Multiple Clusters, Michal Kuchta, Seznam.cz, 1:30 PM

In this session, attendees will follow the story of the growing application with respect to database architecture – from a single-instance database on a developer’s machine to cross-DC multi-cluster HA setup using Galera, ProxySQL, and anycast routing.

Scaling Venmo Applications for Growth With Zero Database Downtime, Kushal Shah, Venom (Paypal Inc.), 2:30 PM

This talk will describe how Venmo used proxy solutions for MongoDB and Aurora-MySQL to scale with traffic, various alternatives explored and driving factors narrowing down to a chosen approach. Venmo will share how they migrated the traffic via proxy with zero downtime, the challenges faced and the solutions applied to achieve their goal. 

Looking Ahead at PostgreSQL 15, Jonathan Katz, AWS, 4:00 PM 

This talk explores many of the new features that will be released in the next major version of PostgreSQL and explains how they can impact your workload. 

Data Consistency at Scale at Meta, Junyi Lu, Meta/Facebook, 5:00 PM

Meta/Facebook has gone through multiple large-scale MySQL rollouts like MyRocks and 8.0 migrations. To avoid the potential data inconsistency introduced by those migrations and various other small rollouts like minor version upgrades, they implemented several large-scale consistency checking tools to help surface issues at an early stage. In this talk, they will cover how these tools work under the hood and share some stories about how they have helped in large-scale rollouts.

Wednesday, May 18, 2022

Deploying Highly Available, Durable Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL and for MySQL Databases with Multi-AZ with Two Readable Standbys, Vijay Karumajji, AWS, 9:30 AM

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for PostgreSQL and for MySQL now support a new Amazon RDS Multi-AZ deployment option with one primary and two readable standby database (DB) instances across three Availability Zones (AZs). With this new option, Multi-AZ users can get up to 2x faster transaction commit latency compared to one with standby, typically under 35-second failovers, and additional read capacity. In this session, learn about the new option, and how it compares to other high availability options, and see a demo on how to get started.

Postgres and the Artificial Intelligence, Ibrar Ahmed, Percona LLC, 10:50 AM

Artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning are intertwined capabilities that attempt to solve problems that defy traditional computational solutions — problems including fraud detection, voice recognition, and search result recommendations. While they elude simple computation, they are computationally expensive, involving the calculation of perhaps millions of probabilities and weights. These computations can be done outside the database, but there are specific advantages of doing machine learning inside it, close to where the data is stored. This presentation explains how to do machine learning inside the Postgres database.

Multi-Tenant Kubernetes Cluster With Percona Operators, Chetan Shivashanker, Percona, 11:50 AM

Percona Operators provides a great way to run databases on Kubernetes. But what if you want to run multiple databases on a single k8s cluster? In this talk, we will explore how this is possible and also walk through some of the best practices that make multi-tenancy of DB on k8s a smooth experience. 

Efficient MySQL Performance, Daniel Nichter, Block, 2:00 PM

MySQL performance can be challenging for new software engineers because where does one begin? Even experienced engineers can find MySQL performance challenging because it’s not their area of expertise. This session covers the path to learning and achieving better MySQL performance by focusing on the most important topics for software engineers using MySQL, not aspiring DBAs. 

Database Resiliency, Ravikumar Buragapu, Adobe, 3:00 PM

This session covers cutting-edge strategies in handling scalability, resiliency, and high availability, building fallout tolerant database solutions, preventing global outages by preventing the propagation of failures, scaling a high-volume, high-transaction based database solution,  and safely performing complex database changes in distributed database solutions. 

 

Register for Percona Live