Percona Live 2015 Wrap Up

moderndba MySQL,

With Percona Live 2015 in the books I thought I should take the time to gather my thoughts.  There was a ton of information shared at the conference.  We sent 3 people to the main conference and one to the new MySQL 101 conference and we still had to leave excellent presentations on the table.  But we got what we came to get.  We feel more comfortable with MySQL in general and with Galera in particular.  We are rolling out a Percona XtraDB Cluster soon and not only did this conference clear up some questions, it also helped us tweak our architecture to provide better availability for our customers.

I could go on and on about all the technical knowledge we gained here, but I have already posted notes on each of the sessions I attended.  But beyond the technical, I was impressed by the vibrant and innovated community surrounding MySQL.  We spoke to people solving some of the most challenging OLTP workloads out there.  Not only did they show us that MySQL can support these workloads, they showed us how MySQL is better suited than proprietary database platforms.  MySQL gives you the ability to scale at a cost point that proprietary RDBMs can’t.

I know some will say that it takes application changes in order reach these levels of scale with MySQL.  This is true today, but I saw several presentations where the MySQL community is working on solving this problem and developing a layer of abstraction that “traditional” applications can connect to and not have to worry about the complexity.  In fact, MariaDB‘s MaxScale is already providing this type of functionality.

Heading back home and thinking about how to use all this knowledge for good I realize that I will have a lot of resistance.  We have a lot invested in our existing proprietary database platforms.  But talking to folks who have been where I sit, I realized this week that if we don’t adapt to speed up the rate of innovation we will become irrelevant.  I for one plan to evolve!

My Session Notes

Leave a comment