Bluekiri @ Percona Live Europe 2018
Last week my colleague Toni Mas and me were attending to the Percona Live Europe 2018 held in Frankfurt. It was a pleasure to be present at one of the most diverse open source database conferences in the world.
With the recent announcements from Percona offering support to PostgreSQL and the upcoming beta release of Percona Server for MongoDB 4.0 the news could not be better to get there and enjoy.
As always, people was the best of everything. You can make contacts and have great chats with people with a lot of experience in databases and share stories. The food and beer was great as well! ;)
TL;TR
Most of the talks where about MySQL/MariaDB, PostgreSQL and MongoDB without forgetting another databases as ClickHouse, ArangoDB, Cassandra or TiDB. They where also sessions about monitoring tools for databases such as Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) or Prometheus. And always keeping an eye on how to secure your database deployment.
Moreover, the Cloud is putting a lot of effort in getting out the most of ‘databases as a service’ so we had live demos about Amazon RDS and Aurora Serverless.
Showcasing emerging technologies and usage on running databases in containers on top of Kubernetes or Mesos with some use cases shown already using it in production environments. Cool stuff!
The first day were full of great sessions and after a good keynote and lighting talks about the hot news of the community such as MySQL 8.0 released just a few weeks ago. The same happened with the PostgreSQL community that had a very awaited PostgreSQL 11.0 release with lots of new features and more performance.
I really liked the experience about running container databases in production from BlaBlaCar using fleet and rkt, from CoreOS. But they are migrating to Kubernetes with docker, the current de-facto standard for running containers nowadays.
Then, a great talk from Bruce Momjian about the PostgreSQL internals, especially the query optimizer which is key to get the best performance. All their awesome presentations and videos are shared here.
After that a few sessions about how to get the most out of PostgreSQL performance and High Avaliability options like Patroni, Stolon, PAF, repmgr, pgpool-II or pglookoutout and a little cool demo of each one.
After lunch I attend to a session very interesting. Artificial Intelligence Database Performance Tunning which uses Genetic Algorithm to test multiple configuration options to get the most performant options in that specific workload in a MySQL Server. The code is open source.
At the end of the day we were to the community networking reception dinner where we met amazing people from the MySQL Community and Percona employees with lots of experience. Great time folks!
The second day was even better. There where a few talks about Clickhouse, a promising column-oriented database from Yandex that runs very very fast. A project development to follow this year, that’s for sure.
Next batch session I was able to attend a talk about the MongoDB 4.0 release and the ACID Transactions support, which you might need or not, because running transactions affects negatively on performance but you can opt out if they are not needed.
In the afternoon I return to the great container path and got into a very interesting talk about how to run MySQL Server Database in Kubernetes by Presslabs. They need a very specific functionality and they build from scratch a Kubernetes operator that has a lot of functionalities built-in.
After that, there was also time for very technical presentations, Hot Update Optimization (HOT) showed us how can result in improved writes rates, less index bloat and reduced vacuum effort. Interesting feature, but only for new applications desings, legacy applications should be redesigned.
To wrap up, it has been a great experience. Great talk sessions and amazing people sharing their experiences. We will come back for sure next year!
We are hiring so reach out if you would like to join us in this amazing journey.
