This Week in Data: Thoughts from Percona Chief Evangelist Colin Charles

Welcome to a new weekly column on the Percona blog. My name is Colin Charles, Percona Chief Evangelist, and I have been involved in MySQL, MariaDB Server and the open source community for over a decade. Now I am at Percona, and this is my weekly column.

When you start a column, you have ask yourself what you’ll be writing about. Keeping the focus on the reader is what’s crucial. With this in mind, I plan to cover happenings, pointers and maybe even musings in this column. It’s August, and while many are away on summer vacations, there’s still plenty happening in the database world. So maybe this will be a little like the now-defunct, Weekly MySQL News. It will be broader than just MySQL, however, and focus on open source databases (after all, Percona’s mission is to to champion unbiased open source database solutions).

So let’s get started! I look forward to feedback/tips via comments, or you can email me directly at colin.charles@percona.com. Feel free to socialize with me! I’m @bytebot on Twitter.

Percona Live Europe Dublin

Percona Live Open Source Database Conference Europe 2017 started in London, moved to Amsterdam (where last year it sold out at 400+ attendees) and is now docking itself in Dublin. Dublin, famous for Guinness, is also now famous a European tech hub. With our expanded conference focus beyond just the MySQL ecosystem, Percona Live Europe also includes MongoDB, PostgreSQL and other open source databases.

Where are we at with the event? The sneak peak schedule is out, and we aim to have a more or less full conference schedule by the second week of August. The conference committee is at its most diverse, with two MongoDB Masters to ensure tighter content around MongoDB, and also two whom are prominent in the DevOps world.

Naturally, evolution is good because you are now getting the “best of the best” talks, as there are less slots to compete when it comes to topics! Registration is open, and you’ll want to sign up as soon as possible to lock in the best available rates.

Percona Live Europe in Dublin is also a great place to be a sponsor as a smaller, intimate event helps ensure that people pop by your expo hall booths. This is great for promoting your products, hiring new folks and so on. Find out more about sponsorship here.

Releases

• Are you testing the MySQL 8.0.2 Milestone Release this summer? It’s definitely worth looking at, with an expansive feature list.
• Percona Toolkit 3.0.4 is out, something any DBA will want to use if you deal with MySQL and MongoDB (yes, there are tools for MongoDB there too).
• Percona Server for MongoDB 3.4.6-1.7 is available, a good MongoDB compatible drop-in replacement, with the MongoRocks and Memory engines (and more).
• Percona Server for MySQL 5.6.36-82.1 and Percona Server for MySQL 5.7.18-16 are available. One of the exciting things in 5.7 is that the MyRocks storage engine has been merged into Percona Server for MySQL.
• ProxySQL 1.4.1 is the first stable release of the 1.4 series, and new features will be in this branch (1.3.x is now for bug fixes).

Link List

• If you’re running a Linux kernel >= 3.9, here’s a great guide on running multiple ProxySQL instances listening on the same port.
• End of the road for Basho: Court puts biz into receivership. Basho, the company that made Riak, including a foray into a time-series database (Riak TS) is now in receivership. Presumably there will be a community forming around the technology, as some companies did use it. At Percona Live Europe Amsterdam 2015, there was even a talk titled: Events storage and analysis with Riak at Booking.com.
• How We Encrypt Data In MySQL With Go is an insightful blog post, with a link to watch a webminar recording titled Developing MySQL Applications with Go.
• MariaDB Developer’s Unconference in Shenzen, China. An announcement went out that the next MariaDB Developer’s Unconference for 2017 will be in Shenzen, China. This is the first time it will also be in Asia. November 13-17 2017 are the important dates. The event will be bi-lingual too.

In coming posts, I expect to cover upcoming events that I’m participating in, and also thoughts about one’s that I’ve been to. See you soon!

Colin Charles

Colin Charles is the Chief Evangelist at Percona. He was previously on the founding team for MariaDB Server in 2009, worked in MySQL since 2005, and been a MySQL user since 2000. Before joining MySQL, he worked actively on the Fedora and OpenOffice.org projects. He's well known within many open source communities, and has spoken on the conference circuit.