Sep
01
2015
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Booking.com’s Jean-François Gagné on Percona Live Amsterdam

Booking.com, one of the world’s leading e-commerce companies, helps travels book nearly 1 million rooms per night. Established in 1996, Booking.com B.V. guarantees the best prices for any type of property, from small, family-run bed and breakfasts to executive apartments and five-star luxury suites.

The travel website is also a dedicated contributor to the MySQL and Perl community. Other open source technologies include CentOS Linux, Nginx, python, puppet, Git and more.

A Diamond sponsor of Percona Live Amsterdam Sept. 21-23, you can meet the people who power Booking.com at booth 205. Enter promo code “BlogInterview” at registration to save €20!

In the meantime, meet Jean-François Gagné, a system engineer at Booking.com. He’ll be presenting a couple of talks: “Riding the Binlog: an in Deep Dissection of the Replication Stream” and “Binlog Servers at Booking.com.”


Tom: Hi Jean-François, in your session, “Riding the Binlog: an in Deep Dissection of the Replication Stream“, you talk about how we can think of the binary logs as a transport for a “Stream of Transactions”. What will be the top 3 things attendees will come away with following this 50-minute talk?

Jean-François: Hi Tom, thanks for this opportunity to give a sneak peak of my talk.  The most important subject that will be discussed is that the binary logs evolves: by the usage of “log-slave-updates”, the stream can grow, shrink or morph.  Said in another way: the binary logs of a slave can be very different from the binary logs of the master, and this should be taken into account when relying on those (including when replicating using intermediate master and when promoting a slave as a new master using GTIDs).  We will also explore how the binary logs can be decomposed in sub-streams, or viewed as the multiplexing of many streams.  We will also look for de-multiplexing functions and the new possibilities that are opened with that.

 

Tom: Percona Live, starting with this conference, has a new venue and a broader theme – now encompassing, in addition to MySQL, MongoDB, NoSQL and data in the cloud. Your thoughts? And what do think is missing – what would you change (if anything)?

Jean-François: I think you forget the best of all changes: going from a 2 day conference last year in London to a 3 day conference this year.  This will allow better knowledge exchange and I am very happy about that.  I think this event will be a success with a good balance of sessions focus on technologies and presentation about a specific use-case of those technologies.  If I had one wish: I would like to see more sessions about specific use-cases of NoSQL technologies with and in deep discussion about why they are a better choice than more traditional solutions: maybe more of those sessions will be submitted next year.

 

Tom: Which other session(s) are you most looking forward to besides your own?

Jean-François: I will definitely attend the Facebook session about Semi-Synchronous Replication: it is very close to my interest, especially as Booking.com is thinking about using loss-less semi-sync replication in the future, and I look forward to hear war stories about this feature.  All sessions dissecting internals of a technology (InnoDB, TokuDB, RocksDB, …) will also have my attention.  Finally, it is always interesting to hear about how large companies are using databases, so I plan to attend the MySQL@Wikimedia session.

 

Tom: As a resident of Amsterdam, what are some of the must-do activities/sightseeing for those visiting for Percona Live from out of town?

Jean-François: Seeing the city from a high point is impressive, and you will have the opportunity of enjoying that view from the Booking.com office at the Community Dinner.  Also, I recommend finding a bike and discover the city pedaling (there are many renting shops, just ask Google).  From the conference venue, you can do a 70 minutes ride crossing three nice parks: the Westerpark, the Rembrandtpark and the Vondelpark – https://goo.gl/P13Mc7 – and you can discover the first of third park in a shorter ride (45 minutes).  If you feel a little more adventurous, I recommend a 90 minute ride South following the Amstel: once out of Amsterdam, you will have the water on one side at the level of the road, and the fields (Polder) 3 meters below on the other side (https://goo.gl/OPDv5z).  This will allow you to see for yourself why this place is called the “Low Countries”.

The post Booking.com’s Jean-François Gagné on Percona Live Amsterdam appeared first on Percona Data Performance Blog.

Aug
26
2015
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ObjectRocket’s David Murphy talks about MongoDB, Percona Live Amsterdam

Say hello to David Murphy, lead DBA and MongoDB Master at ObjectRocket (a Rackspace company). David works on sharding, tool building, very large-scale issues and high-performance MongoDB architecture. Prior to ObjectRocket he was a MySQL/NoSQL architect at Electronic Arts. David enjoys large-scale operational tool building, high performance OS and database tuning. He is also a core code contributor to MongoDB. He’ll be speaking next month at Percona Live Amsterdam, which runs Sept. 21-13. Enter promo code “BlogInterview” at registration to save €20!


Tom: David, your 3-hour tutorial is titled “Mongo Sharding from the trench: A Veterans field guide.” Did your experience in working with vast amounts of data at Rackspace give you a unique perspective, in view, that now puts you into a position to help people just getting started? Can you give a couple examples?

David: I think this has been something organically I grew into from the days of supporting Cpanel type MySQL instances to today. I have worked for a few verticals from hosts to advertising to gaming, finally entering into the platform service. The others give me a host of knowledge around how customer need systems to work, and then the number and range of workloads we see at Rackspace re-enforces this.

ObjectRocket's David Murphy talks MongoDB & Percona Live Amsterdam

ObjectRocket’s David Murphy

Many times the unique perspective comes with the scale such as someone calling up a single node to the multi-terabyte range. When they go to “shard” they can find the process that is normally very light and unnoticeable to most Mongo sharding can severally lock the metadata for an extended time. In other cases, the “balancer” might not be able to keep up with the amount of working being asked of it.

Toward the smaller end of the spectrum, having seen so many workloads from big to small. I can see similar thought processes and trends. When this happens having worked with some many of these workloads, and honestly having learned along the evolution of mongo helps me explain to clients the good, bad, and the hairy. Many times discussions come down to people not using connection pooling, non-indexed sorting, or complex operators such as $in, $nin, and more. In these cases, I can talk to people about the balance of using these concepts and when they will become bigger issues for them. My goal is to give them the enough knowledge to help determine when it is correct to use development resource to fix and issue, and when it’s manageable and that development could be better spent elsewhere.

 

Tom: The title of your tutorial also sounds like the perfect title of a book. Do you have any for one?

David: What an excellent question! I have thought about this. However, I think the goal of a book if I can find the time to do it. A working title might be “Mongo from the trenches: Surviving the minefield to get ahead”. I think the book might be broken into three sections:  “When should you use or not user Mongo”,  “Schema and Operatorators in the NoSQL world”, “Sharding”. I would do this as this could be a great mini book on its own the community really could use a level of depth similar to the MySQL 5.0 certification guides.  I liked these books as it helped someone understand all the bits of what to consider with your schema design and how it affects the application as much as the database hosts. Then in the second half more administration geared it took those same schema and design choices to help you manage them with confidence.

In the end, Mongo is a good product that works well for most people as it matures we need more and discussion. On topics such as what should you monitor, how you should predict issues, and how valuable are regular audits. Especially in an ecosystem where it’s easy to spin something up, launch it, and move on to the next project.

 

Tom: When and why would you recommend using MongoDB instead of MySQL?

David: I am glad I mentioned this is worthy of a book already, as it is such a complex topic and one that gets me very excited.

I feel there is a bit or misinformation on both sides of this field. Many in the MySQL camp of experts know when someone says they can’t get more than 1000 TPS via MySQL. 9 out of 10 times and design, not a technology issue,  the Mongo crowd love this and due to inherit sharding nature of Mongo they can sidestep these types of issues. Conversely in the Mongo camp you will hear how bad the  SQL standard is, however, omitting transactions for a moment, the same types of operations exist in MySQL and Mongo.  There are some interesting powers in the Mongo aggregation. However, SQL is more powerful and just as complex as some map reduce jobs and aggregations I have written.

As to your question, MySQL will always win in regards to repeatable reads to the database in a transaction. There is some talk of limited transactions in Mongo. However, these will likely not become global and cluster wide anytime soon if ever.  I don’t trust floats in Mongo for financials; it’s not that Mongo doesn’t do them but rather JavaScript type floats are present. Sometimes you need to store data as a 64-bit integer and do math in the app to make it a high precision float. MySQL, on the other hand, has excellent support for precision.

Another area is simply looking at the history of Mongo and MySQL.  Mongo until WiredTiger and  RocksDB were very similar to MyISAM from a locking behavior and support perspective. With the advent of the new storage system, we will-will see major leaps forward in types of flows you will want in Mongo. With the writer lock issue is gone, and locking between the systems is becoming more and more similar making deciding which much harder.

The news is not all use. However, subdocuments and array support in Mongo is amazing there are so many things  I can do in Mongo that even in bitwise SET/ENUM operators I could not do. So if you need that type of system, or you want to create a semi denormalize for of a view in the database. Mongo can do this with ease and on the fly. MySQL, on the other hand, would take careful planning and need whole tables updated.  In this regard I feel more people could use Mongo and is ability to have a versioned document schema allowing more incremental changes to documents. With new code  releases, allowing the application to read old version and “upgrade” them to the latest form. Removing a whole flurry of maintenance related pains that RDBMs have to the frustration of developers who just want to launch the new product.

The last thing I would want to say here is you need not choose, why not use both. Mongo can be very powerful for keeping a semi denormalized version of the data that is nimble to allow fast application or system updates and features. Leaving MySQL for a very specific workload that need the precision are simple are not expected to have schema changes.  I am a huge fan of keeping the transactional portions in MySQL, and the rest in Mongo. Allowing you to scale quickly up and down the build of your data needs, and more slowly change the parts that need to be 100% consistent all of the time with no room for eventual consistency.

 

Tom: What another session(s) are you most looking forward to besides your own at Percona Live Amsterdam?

David: There are a few that are near and dear to me.

Turtles all the way down: tuning Linux for database workloads” looks like a great one. It is one view I have always had, and DBA’s should be DBA’s,  SysAdmins, and Storage people rolled into one. That way they can understand the impacts of the application down to the blocks the database reads.

TokuDB internals” is another one. I have used TokuDB in MySQL and Mongo to some degree but as it has never had in-depth documentation. A topic like that is a great way to fill any gaps for experienced and new people alike.

Database Reliability Engineering” looks like a great talk from a great speaker.

As an InnoDB geek, I like the idea around “Understanding InnoDB locks: case studies.”

I see a huge amount of potential for MaxScale if anyone else is curious, “Anatomy of a Proxy Server: MaxScale Internals” should be good for R/W splits and split writing type cases.

Finally, one of my favorite people is Charity as she always is so energetic and can get to the heart of the matter. If you are not going to “Upgrade your database: without losing your data, your perf or your mind” you are missing out!

 

Tom: Thanks for speaking with me, David! Is there anything else you’d like to add: either about Rackspace or Percona Live Amsterdam?

David: In regards to Rackspace, I urge everyone to check out the Data Services group.  We handle everything from Redis to Hadoop with a goal of augmenting your groups or providing experts to help keep your uptime as high as possible. With options for dedicated hosts to platform type services, there is something that helps everyone. Rackspace is not just a cloud company but a real support company that provides amazing hardware to use, or support for other hardware location that is growing rapidly.

With Percona Amsterdam, everyone should come the group of speakers is simply amazing, I for one am excited by so many topics because they are all so compelling. Outside of that you will it hard find another a gathering of database experts with multiple technologies under their belt and who truly believe in the move to picking the right technology for the right use case.

The post ObjectRocket’s David Murphy talks about MongoDB, Percona Live Amsterdam appeared first on Percona Data Performance Blog.

Aug
13
2015
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The language of compression

Leif Walsh & friends

Leif Walsh will talk about the language of compression at Percona Live Amsterdam

Storage. Everyone needs it. Whether your data is in MySQL, a NoSQL, or somewhere in the cloud, with ever-growing data volumes – along with the need for SSDs to cut latency and replication to provide insurance – an organization’s storage footprint is an important place to look for savings. That’s where compression comes in (squeeze!) to save disk space.

Two Sigma software engineer Leif Walsh speaks the language of compression. Fluently. In fact, he’ll be speaking on

that exact subject September 22 during the Percona Live conference in Amsterdam.

I asked him about his talk, and about Amsterdam, the other day. Here’s what he had to say.

* * *

Tom: Hi Leif, how will your talk help IT decision-makers cut through the marketing mumbo-jumbo on what’s important to focus on and what is not
Leif: My talk will have three lessons aimed at those making storage decisions for their company:

  1. What are the key factors to consider when evaluating storage options, and how can they affect your bottom line?  This is not only how storage tech influences your hardware, operations, and management costs, but also how it can facilitate new development initiatives and cut time-to-market for your products.
  2. How should you read benchmarks and marketing materials about storage technology?  You’ll learn what to look for in promotional material, and how to think critically about whether that material is applicable to your business needs.
  3. What’s the most effective way to communicate with storage vendors about your application’s requirements?  A lot of time can be spent in the early stages of a relationship in finding a common language for users and vendors to have meaningful discussions about users’ needs and vendors’ capacity to meet those needs.  With the tools you’ll learn in my talk, you’ll be able to accelerate quickly to the high-bandwidth conversations you need to have in order to make the right decision, and consequently, you’ll be empowered to evaluate more choices to find the best one faster.

Tom: In addition to IT decision-makers, who else should attend your session and what will they take away afterward?
Leif: My talk is primarily about the language that everyone in the storage community should be using to communicate. Therefore, storage vendors should attend to get ideas for how  to express their benchmarks and their system’s properties more effectively, and application developers and operations people will learn strategies for getting better support and for making a convincing case to the decision makers in their own company.

Tom: Which session(s) are you most looking forward to besides your own?
Leif: Sam Kottler is a good friend and an intensely experienced systems engineer with a dynamic and boisterous personality, so I can’t wait to hear more about his experiences with Linux tuning.

As one of the original developers of TokuMX, I’ll absolutely have to check out Stephane’s talk about it, but I promise not to heckle. Charity Majors is always hilarious and has great experiences and insights to share, so I’ll definitely check out her talk too.

* * *

Catch Leif’s talk at Percona Live in Amsterdam September 21-23. Enter the promo code “BlogInterview” at registration and save €20! Register now!

The post The language of compression appeared first on MySQL Performance Blog.

Jul
09
2015
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Percona Live Europe 2015 conference, tutorials schedule now available

Percona Live Europe 2015The conference and tutorial schedule for Percona Live Europe 2015, September 21-23 in Amsterdam, was published this morning and this year’s event will focus on MySQL, NoSQL and Data in the Cloud.

Conference sessions, which will follow each morning’s keynote addresses, feature a variety of formal tracks and sessions. Topic areas include: high availability (HA), DevOps, programming, performance optimization, replication and backup, MySQL in the cloud, MySQL and NoSQL. There will also be MySQL case studies, session on security and talks about “What’s new in MySQL.”

Technology experts from the world’s leading MySQL and NoSQL vendors and users – including Oracle, MariaDB, Percona, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn and Yelp – will deliver the sessions. Sessions will include:

  • “InnoDB: A Journey to the Core,” Jeremy Cole, Systems Engineer, Google and Davi Arnaut, Software Engineer, LinkedIn
  • “MongoDB Patterns and Antipatterns for Dev and Ops,” Steffan Mejia, Principal Consulting Engineer, MongoDB, Inc.
  • “NoSQL’s Biggest Lie: SQL Never Went Away,” Matthew Revell, Lead Developer Advocate, Couchbase
  • “The Future of Replication is Today: New Features in Practice,” Giuseppe Maxia, Quality Assurance Architect, VMware
  • “What’s New in MySQL 5.7,” Geir Høydalsvik, Senior Software Development Director, Oracle
Tutorial Schedule

Tutorials provide practical, in-depth knowledge of critical MySQL issues. Topics will include:

  • “Best Practices for MySQL High Availability,” Colin Charles, Chief Evangelist, MariaDB
  • “Mongo Sharding from the Trench: A Veterans Field Guide,” David Murphy, Lead DBA, Rackspace Data Stores
  • “Advanced Percona XtraDB Cluster in a Nutshell, La Suite: Hands on Tutorial Not for Beginners!,” Frederic Descamps, Senior Architect, Percona
Featured Events
  • On Monday, September 21 at 5 p.m., Percona will host an opening reception at the Delirium Café in Amsterdam.
  • On Tuesday, September 22 at 7 p.m., the Community Dinner will take place at the offices of Booking.com.
  • On Wednesday September 23 at 6 p.m., the closing reception will be held at the Mövenpick Hotel, giving attendees one last chance to visit the sponsor kiosks.
Sponsorships

Sponsorship opportunities for Percona Live Europe 2015 are still available but they are selling out fast. Event sponsors become part of a dynamic and fast-growing ecosystem and interact with hundreds of DBAs, sysadmins, developers, CTOs, CEOs, business managers, technology evangelists, solution vendors and entrepreneurs who typically attend the event. This year’s conference will feature expanded accommodations and turnkey kiosks. Current sponsors include:

  • Diamond: VMware
  • Exhibitors: MariaDB, Severalnines
  • Media: Business Cloud News, Computerworld UK, TechWorld
Planning to Attend?

Early Bird registration discounts for Percona Live Europe 2015 are available through July 26, 2015 at 11:30 p.m. CEST.

The post Percona Live Europe 2015 conference, tutorials schedule now available appeared first on MySQL Performance Blog.

Mar
25
2015
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Yelp IT! A talk with 3 Yelp MySQL DBAs on Percona Live & more

elp IT! A talk with 3 Yelp MySQL DBAs heading to Percona Live 2015Founded in 2004 to help people find great local businesses, Yelp has some 135 million monthly unique visitors. With those traffic volumes Yelp’s 300+ engineers are constantly working to keep things moving smoothly – and when you move that fast you learn many things.

Fortunately for the global MySQL community, three Yelp DBAs will be sharing what they’ve learned at the annual Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo this April 13-16 in Santa Clara, California.

Say “hello” to Susanne Lehmann, Jenni Snyder and Josh Snyder! I chatted with them over email about their presentations, on how MySQL is used at Yelp, and about the shortage of women in MySQL.

***

Tom: Jenni, you and Josh will be co-presenting “Next generation monitoring: moving beyond Nagios ” on April 14.

You mentioned that Yelp’s databases scale dynamically, and so does your monitoring of those databases. And to minimize human intervention, you’ve created a Puppet and Sensu monitoring ensemble… because “if it’s not monitored, it’s not in production.” Talk to me more about Yelp’s philosophy of “opt-out monitoring.” What does that entail? How does that help Yelp?

Jenni: Before we moved to Sensu, our Nagios dashboards were a sea of red, muted, acknowledged, or disabled service checks. In fact, we even had a cluster check to make sure that we never accidentally put a host into use that was muted or marked for downtime. It was possible for a well-meaning operator to acknowledge checks on a host and forget about it, and I certainly perpetrated a couple of instances of disks filling up after acknowledging a 3am “warning” page that I’d rather forget about. With Sensu, hosts and services come out of the downtime/acknowledgement state automatically after a number of days, ensuring that we’re kept honest and stay on top of issues that need to be addressed.

Also, monitoring is deployed with a node, not separate monitoring configuration. Outside of a grace period we employ when a host is first provisioned or rebooted, if a host is up, it’s being monitored and alerting. Also, alerting doesn’t always mean paging. We also use IRC and file tickets directly into our tracking system when we don’t need eyes on a problem right away.


Tom: Susanne, in your presentation, titled “insert cassandra into prod where use_case=?;” you’ll discuss the situations you’ve encountered where MySQL just wasn’t the right tool for the job.

What led up to that discovery and how did you come up with finding the right tools (and what were they) to run alongside and support MySQL?

Susanne: Our main force behind exploring other datastores alongside MySQL was that Yelp is growing outside the US market a lot. Therefore we wanted the data to be nearer to the customer and needed multi-master writes.

Also, we saw use cases where our application data was organized very key-value like and not relational, which made them a better fit for a NoSQL solution.

We decided to use Cassandra as a datastore and I plan to go more into detail why during my talk. Now we offer developers more choices on how to store our application data, but we also believe in the “right tool for the job” philosophy and might add more solutions to the mix in the future.


Tom: Jenni, you’ll also be presenting “Schema changes multiple times a day? OK!” I know that you and your fellow MySQL DBAs are always improving and also finding better ways of supporting new and existing features for Yelp users like me. Delivering on such a scale must entail some unique processes and tools. Does this involve a particular mindset among your fellow DBAs? Also, what are some of those key tools – and processes and how are they used?

Jenni: Yelp prizes the productivity of our developers and our ability to iterate and develop new features quickly. In order to do that, we need to be able to not only create new database tables, but also modify existing ones, many of which are larger than MySQL can alter without causing considerable replication delay. The first step is to foster a culture of automated testing, monitoring, code reviews, and partnership between developers and DBAs to ensure that we can quickly & safely roll out schema changes. In my talk, I’ll be describing tools that we’ve talked about before, like our Gross Query Checker, as well as the way the DBA team works with developers while still getting the rest of our work done. The second, easy part is using a tool like pt-online-schema-change to run schema changes online without causing replication delay or degrading performance :)


Tom: Josh, you’ll also be speaking on “Bootstrapping databases in a single command: elastic provisioning for the win.” What is “elastic provisioning” and how are you using it for Yelp’s tooling?

Josh: When I say that we use elastic provisioning, I mean that we can reliably and consistently build a database server from scratch, with minimal human involvement. The goal is to encompass every aspect of the provisioning task, including configuration, monitoring, and even load balancing, in a single thoroughly automated process. With this process in place, we’ve found ourselves able to quickly allocate and reallocate resources, both in our datacenters and in the cloud. Our tools for implementing the above goals give us greater confidence in our infrastructure, while avoiding single-points of failure and achieving the maximum possible level of performance. We had a lot of fun building this system, and we think that many of the components involved are relevant to others in the field.


Tom: Susanne and Jenni, last year at Percona Live there was a BoF session titled “MySQL and Women (or where are all the women?).” The idea was to discuss why there are “just not enough women working on the technology side of tech.” In a nutshell, the conversation focused on why there are not more women in MySQL and why so relatively few attend MySQL conferences like Percona Live.

The relative scarcity of women in technical roles was also the subject of an article published in the August 2014 issue of Forbes, citing a recent industry report.

Why, in your (respective) views, do you (or don’t) think that there are so few women in MySQL? And how can this trend be reversed?

Susanne: I think there are few women in MySQL and the reasons are manifold. Of course there is the pipeline problem. Then there is the problem, widely discussed right now, that women who are entering STEM jobs are less likely staying in there. These are reasons not specific for MySQL jobs, but rather for STEM in general. What is more specific for database/MySQL jobs is, in my opinion, that often times DBAs need to be on call, they need to stay in the office if things go sideways. Database problems tend often to be problems that can’t wait till the next morning. That makes it more demanding when you have a family for example (which is true for men as well of course, but seems still to be more of a problem for women).

As for how to reverse the trend, I liked this Guardian article because it covers a lot of important points. There is no easy solution.

I like that more industry leaders and technology companies are discussing what they can do to improve diversity these days. In general, it really helps to have a great professional (female) support system. At Yelp, we have AWE, the Awesome Women in Engineering group, in which Jenni and I are both active. We participate in welcoming women to Yelp engineering, speaking at external events and workshops to help other women present their work, mentoring, and a book club.

Jenni: I’m sorry that I missed Percona Live and this BoF last year; I was out on maternity leave. I believe that tech/startup culture is a huge reason that fewer women are entering and staying these days, but a quick web search will lead you to any number of articles debating the subject. I run into quite a few women working with MySQL; it’s large, open community and generally collaborative and supportive nature is very welcoming. As the article you linked to suggests, MySQL has a broad audience. It’s easy to get started with and pull into any project, and as a result, most software professionals have worked with it at some time or another.

On another note, I’m happy to see that Percona Live has a Code of Conduct. I hope that Percona and/or MySQL will consider adopting a Community Code of Conduct like Python, Puppet, and Ubuntu. Doing so raises the bar for all participants, without hampering collaboration and creativity!

* * *

Thanks very much, Susanne, Jenni and Josh! I look forward to seeing you next month at the conference. And readers, if you’d like to attend Percona Live, use the promo code Yelp15 for 15% off! Just enter that during registration. If you’re already attending, be sure to tweet about your favorite sessions using the hashtag #PerconaLive. And if you need to find a great place to eat while attending Percona Live, click here for excellent Yelp recommendations. :)

The post Yelp IT! A talk with 3 Yelp MySQL DBAs on Percona Live & more appeared first on MySQL Performance Blog.

Feb
23
2015
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MySQL community t-shirt contest for Percona Live 2015

MySQL community t-shirt contest for Percona Live 2105Have designs on Percona Live this April in Silicon Valley? Send them to us! The winning entry will appear on a cool limited edition t-shirt that we’ll award to a few dozen lucky recipients at our booth’s new Percona T-Shirt Bar. The winner will also get a t-shirt, of course, along with a pair “Beats by Dre” headphones!

That’s right: We’re calling on the creative types within the MySQL community to come up with designs for a unique t-shirt.

Let your imaginations run free! Just make sure to include “Percona Live 2015” in there somewhere. You might also want to include your signature, hanko, seal or mark… treat the cotton as the canvas of your masterpiece… let the world know who created it!

Send your t-shirt designs to me as a high-resolution PDF or in .EPS format. The deadline for entries is March 6. The winner will be chosen under the sole discretion of Percona’s marketing team, taking into consideration quality of design, values alignment, trademark clearance and general awesomeness. (Submitted designs assume unlimited royalty free rights usage by Percona. We also reserve the right to declare no winners if there are no suitable designs submitted. You do not need to register or attend the conference to submit a design.)

Click here to submit your design for the MySQL community t-shirt contest!

By the way, the image on this post is not a template. You have free rein so go get ‘em! And just to be clear: this won’t be the t-shirt that everyone receives at the registration booth. However, it just might be one of the most coveted t-shirts at the conference!

I’ll share the winning design the week of March 9. Good luck and I hope to see you all this April and the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo! The conference runs April 13-16 at the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara & the Santa Clara Convention Center.

 

The post MySQL community t-shirt contest for Percona Live 2015 appeared first on MySQL Performance Blog.

Dec
16
2014
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OpenStack Live tutorials & sessions to bring OpenStack users up to speed

I attended the OpenStack Paris summit last month (Percona had a booth there). It was my first opportunity to meet face-to-face with this thriving community of developers and users. I’m proud that Percona is part of this open source family and look forward to reconnecting with many of the developers and users I met in Paris – as well as meeting new faces – at OpenStack Live in Silicon Valley April 13-14.

OpenStack Live 2015: Sneak peak of the April conferenceOpenStack summits, generally held twice a year, are the place where (for the most part) developers meet and design “in the open,” as the OpenStack organization says. OpenStack Live 2015, held in parallel with the annual Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo, will be a unique opportunity for users and enthusiasts to learn from leading OpenStack experts in the field about top cloud strategies, improving overall cloud performance, and operational best practices for managing and optimizing OpenStack and its MySQL database core.

OpenStack Live will also provide some serious classroom-style learning. Percona announced the OpenStack Live tutorials sessions a couple days ago. Most sessions are three hours long and because they really are “hands-on” require that you bring your laptop – and a power cord (not to be confused with a “power chord,” though those also welcome”).

Let’s take a closer look at the OpenStack Live tutorial sessions.


Barbican: Securing Your Secrets.” Join Rackspace gurus Douglas Mendizábal, Chelsea Winfree and Steve Heyman on a tour through the magical world of Barbican (yes, they are dedicated members of the Barbican project).

Don’t be intimidated if don’t have any previous experience with Barbican (and if you’ve never heard of it, more the reason to attend!). A basic understanding of security components (such as keys and certificates) and a basic understanding of ReST is helpful, but not required.

By the end of the class you will know:
1)   Importance of secret storage
2)   How to store & retrieve secrets with Barbican
3)   How to submit an order with Barbican
4)   How to create a container
5)   Use cases for Barbican / Examples
6)   The future of Barbican –Ordering SSL Certs


Deploying, Configuring and Operating OpenStack Trove.” As the title suggests, these three hours focus squarely on Trove. The tutorial – led by Tesora founder & CTO Amrith Kumar, along with Doug Shelley, the company’s vice president of product development – will begin with a quick overview of OpenStack and the various services.

If you attend this tutorial you’ll actually deploy your own OpenStack environment – and create and manage a Nova (compute) instance using a command line and a graphical user interface (Horizon). And the fun continues! You’ll then install and configure Trove, and create and manage a single MySQL instance. Finally, pupils will create and operate a simple replicated MySQL instance pair and ensure that data is being properly replicated from master to slave.


Essential DevStack.” DevStack is an opinionated script to quickly create an OpenStack development environment. It can also be used to demonstrate starting/running OpenStack services and provide examples of using them from a command line. The power of DevStack lies within small trick that if people understand can hugely improve the contribution effectiveness, quality and required time. This three-hour tutorial will be led by Red Hat senior software engineer Swapnil Kulkarni.


OpenStack Networking Introduction,” with PLUMgrid’s Valentina Alaria and Brendan Howes. Buckle your seat belts! Designed for IT professionals looking to expand their OpenStack “networking” (no, not the LinkedIn sort of networking) knowledge, OpenStack Networking Fundamentals will be a comprehensive and fast-paced course.

This half-day training provides an overview of OpenStack, its components and then dives deep into OpenStack Networking – the features and plugin model and its role in building an OpenStack Cloud. The training is concluded with a hands-on lab to bring all the concepts together.

OpenStack Networking (Neutron) Introduction [1 hour]
– Goal of Neutron
– Architecture of Neutron
– Plugin Architecture
– Use cases for Neutron
– What’s new in Juno & what’s planned for Kilo

OpenStack Networking (Neutron) Advanced [1 hour]
– Interaction with other OpenStack components (Compute & Storage)
– Designing Neutron for HA
– Installing Neutron
– Troubleshooting Neutron

Hands-on Lab [1 hour]
– Creation of tenant networks
– Configuration of external connectivity
– Advanced Features Configurati


Percona’s director of conferences, Kortney Runyan, offered a sneak peek at the OpenStack sessions last week. Attendees of the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo 2015 (April 13-16, 2015) with full-pass access are also welcome to attend OpenStack Live sessions. The two conferences are running in parallel, which is very exciting since there will be crossover opportunities between them.

I hope to see you next April! And be sure to take advantage of Early Bird pricing for OpenStack Live (register here).
And if you are an organizer of an OpenStack (or MySQL) Meetup and need some financial help, Percona is happy to chip in as a sponsor. Just let me know and I’ll work with you to set that up! You can drop me a note in the comments and I’ll contact you offline.

OpenStack Live tutorials & sessions to bring users up to speed

The post OpenStack Live tutorials & sessions to bring OpenStack users up to speed appeared first on MySQL Performance Blog.

Apr
04
2014
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Facebook’s Yoshinori Matsunobu on MySQL, WebScaleSQL & Percona Live

Facebook's Yoshinori Matsunobu

Facebook’s Yoshinori Matsunobu

I spoke with Facebook database engineer Yoshinori Matsunobu here at Percona Live 2014 today about a range of topics, including MySQL at Facebook, the company’s recent move to WebScaleSQL, new MySQL flash storage technologies – and why attending the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo each year is very important to him.

Facebook engineers are hosting several sessions at this year’s conference and all have been standing room only. That’s not too surprising considering that Facebook, the undisputed king of online social networks, has 1.23 billion monthly active users collectively contributing to an ocean of data-intensive tasks – making the company one of the world’s top MySQL users. And they are sharing what they’ve learned in doing so this week.

You can read my previous post where I interviewed five Facebook MySQL experts (Steaphan Greene, Evan Elias, Shlomo Priymak, Yoshinori Matsunobu and Mark Callaghan) and below is my short video interview with Yoshi, who will lead his third and final session of the conference today at 12:50 p.m. Pacific time titled, “Global Transaction ID at Facebook.”

The post Facebook’s Yoshinori Matsunobu on MySQL, WebScaleSQL & Percona Live appeared first on MySQL Performance Blog.

Mar
27
2014
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A conversation with 5 Facebook MySQL gurus

A conversation with 6 Facebook MySQL gurusFacebook, the undisputed king of online social networks, has 1.23 billion monthly active users collectively contributing to an ocean of data-intensive tasks – making the company one of the world’s top MySQL users.

A small army of Facebook MySQL experts will be converging on Santa Clara, Calif. next week where several of them are leading sessions at the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo. I had the chance to chat virtually with four of them about their sessions: Steaphan Greene, Evan Elias, Shlomo Priymak and Yoshinori MatsunobuMark Callaghan, who spoke at Percona Live last year, also joined our conversation which included a discussion of Facebook’s use of MySQL and other open source technologies.


Tom: What’s Facebook’s view of Open Source?

Steaphan: Facebook was built on open source software, and we still invest heavily in open source today. We understand the power these communities have to drive innovation – they allow us to focus on new challenges, as opposed to reinventing the wheel over and over again. And contributing as much as possible back to open projects is in everyone’s best interest.


Tom: Why MySQL? Wouldn’t NoSQL databases, for example, be better suited for the massive workloads seen at Facebook?

Mark: MySQL is great for many of our important workloads. We make it even better with our expertise in MySQL operations and engineering, and by working with the community and learning from their experience.

Yoshinori: I have not been able to find a transactional NoSQL database better than InnoDB. And it’s easy to understand how MySQL Replication works, which makes much easier to fix problems in production.


 Tom: How does Facebook make MySQL scale?

Steaphan: Sharding, automation, monitoring, and heavy investment in operations and performance engineering.


 Tom: What other things help Facebook run smoothly?

Steaphan: Our completely open culture, and the freedom all engineers here have to try any idea they have.


Tom: What is the top scaling challenge(s) Facebook faces in 2014 – and beyond?

Mark: Our biggest challenge is to make things better (performance, efficiency, availability) in the future at the rate we made things better in the past.

Yoshinori: Availability has improved a lot so far for us. Come to my session at Percona Live to hear about that. For me personally, efficiency is the biggest challenge for 2014 and 2015. This includes reducing space and optimizing for newer-generation hardware.


Tom: Facebook deployed MySQL 5.6 last year – including on critical environments – long before many other large organizations. What prompted such a move so soon? And where there any major concerns?

Steaphan: The same thing that prompts most efforts on the Facebook infra team: We will consider any technology that will help us improve performance, efficiency, or reliability, and we’re willing to accept the risk that sometimes comes along with adopting things like 5.6 very early on. But that’s only half the story here. The other half is that Facebook encourages its engineers to go after big bets like these — in this case it was just one engineer who made this happen. And we had the MySQL engineering talent we needed to work with the Oracle team to get 5.6 ready for production at our scale.

Yoshinori: At Facebook, we have three MySQL teams — Operations, Performance and Engineering. Facebook is one of the very few MySQL users that has internal MySQL developers. We all worked hard to adapt 5.6 to our scale and ensure that it would be production-ready. We found some issues after production deployment, but in many cases we could fix the problem and deployed new MySQL binary within one or two days. When deploying in production, we expected that we encountered MySQL 5.6 specific issues, which was typical when releasing new software. We were just confident that we could fix issues immediately.

Our 5.6 deployment step was not all at once. At first rollout, we disabled most major 5.6 features, such as GTID and binlog checksum. We gradually enabled such features in production.


Tom: Where there any significant issues in that move to MySQL 5.6? Any lessons learned you like to share – along with best practices you’d like to share?

Yoshinori: Performance regression of the CPU intensive replication was a main blocker for some of our applications. I wrote a blog post about this last year. We have several design plans to fix the problem on MySQL side. One of the most effective plans is grouping multiple transactions into one, since the most expensive part is writing to InnoDB system table at transaction commit. This optimization would be done when writing binary log, or by SQL thread. It may take longer time to test and deploy in production. For existing applications, we optimized to group multiple transactions from application side to mitigate the problem.


Tom: Performance monitoring is usually challenging at any organization. How do you do that at Facebook, which has tens of thousands of MySQL instances?

Yoshinori: Top-N monitoring is very important for managing a huge number of instances. Average statistics (for example: average innodb_rows_read across all instances) is not always useful since ~1% of problematic instances won’t noticeably change average numbers. p99 gives better indicators, but in our environment we typically have fewer than 0.1% instances causing problems, in which case p99 is not helpful either. We have several graphical and command-line tools to efficiently list up top-N bad behaving hosts. After listing up bad instances, the way to investigate root cause is pretty straightforward, like what MySQL consultants usually do. Server failure is something we expect and plan for at Facebook. For example, typical MySQL DBA at small companies may not encounter master instance failure during employment, because recent mysqld and H/W are stable enough. At Facebook, master failure is a norm and something the system can accommodate.


Tom: Evan, you and Yoshinori will present on Global Transaction ID (GTID) at Facebook. GTID is very tricky to deploy to an existing large-scale environment – how, and why, did you decide on adopting it?

Evan: Our primary motivations for adopting GTID all relate to either failover or binlog backups. When a master fails, getting replicas in sync with GTID is substantially simpler, faster, and less error-prone than previous methods of diffing binlogs. For backups, GTID is a cornerstone in building cross-datacenter point-in-time recovery, without needing redundant binlog streams from every region.

The “how” question is a bit more involved, and we’ll be covering this in detail during the session. The GTID project was a joint effort between three of Facebook’s MySQL teams. Santosh added new functionality to the MySQL server to make online rollout possible, and Yoshinori improved MHA to seamlessly support GTID-based failover. I added GTID support to all of our other in-house automation, and also scripted the rollout procedure across our many thousands of replica sets. A lot of validation logic and monitoring functionality was involved to ensure the safety of the rollout.


Tom: Shlomo, your session is titled “Under the Hood – MySQL Pool Scanner (MPS).” As you point out in your talk, Facebook has one of the largest MySQL database clusters in the world, comprising thousands of servers across multiple data centers. You must have an army of DBAs – or is there some secret you’d like to share? 

Shlomo: We do have an army, yes — it’s an “army of one.” We have one person on call on the MySQL Operations team at a given time, and they don’t even need to do all that much most days. We built “robots” to do our day to day jobs. The largest and most complex robot we have is MPS, an automated system to do most of the work a DBA might otherwise spend time on, such as replacement of broken or overflowing servers. Among other things, MPS also allows a human to initiate complex bulk operations with a few keystrokes, and it will follow up and complete the operations over the course of days or weeks.

I’ll be describing some of the complex MySQL automation systems we have at Facebook, and how they fit together during my talk.


Tom: Shlomo, what does a typical day look like for you there at Facebook?

Shlomo: The team’s work mostly focuses on maintaining those robots I’ve mentioned, as well as developing new ways to improve the reliability of our databases for Facebook’s users. This year the team also spent a lot of time making sure the new MySQL features such as GTIDs and semi-sync are deeply integrated in our automation. Every day, we work hard to to make ourselves obsolete, but we haven’t gotten there just yet!

On a typical day, I probably spend much of the time coding, mainly in Python. I also spend a significant amount of time working on capacity-related projects, such as thinking of ways to optimize the way we distribute the data across our fleet of servers.
Even after 2.5 years at Facebook, I am still in awe of the number of servers we manage. The typical small-scale maintenance operation at Facebook probably involves more servers than all the companies I’ve previously worked for had, combined. It really is pretty amazing!


Tom:  What are you looking forward to the most at this year’s conference?

Evan: There are plenty of fascinating sessions this year. Just to mention a handful: Jeremy Cole and Davi Arnaut’s session on innodb_ruby, since it’s a very unique way to interactively learn about InnoDB’s internals. Baron Schwartz’s session on using Go with MySQL, as VividCortex is blazing the trail here. Peter Boros and Kenny Gryp’s talk on scalability and benchmarking, which I’m hoping will include recent developments of Percona Playback. Tom Christ’s session on my former project Jetpants, to see how it has evolved over the past year at Tumblr. And several talks by Oracle engineers about upcoming functionality in MySQL 5.7.

Steaphan: In addition to the conference sessions, I look forward to the birds of a feather session with the MySQL team.  Last year, it proved to be a valuable opportunity to engage with those upstream developers who make the changes we care about, and I expect the same this year.


Tom: If you could talk to a DBA or developer on the fence about attending this year’s conference, what would be your top 3-5 reasons for making it over to Santa Clara for this event?

Evan: I’m based in NYC, so I’m traveling a bit further than many of my colleagues, but I can still confidently say that Percona Live is well worth the trip. The MySQL ecosystem is very healthy and constantly evolving, and the conference is the best place to learn about ongoing developments across a wide spectrum of companies and contributors. It’s also a perfect opportunity to personally connect with all of the amazing engineers, DBAs, users, and vendors that make MySQL so unique and compelling.


 The Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo 2014 runs April 1-4 in Santa Clara, Calif. Use the code “SeeMeSpeak” when registering and save 10 percent. The inaugural Open Source Appreciation Day is on March 31 – this full-day event is free but because space is limited I suggest registering now to reserve your spot.

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