Percona Live 2018 Keynotes, Day One

Welcome to Percona Live 2018 keynotes, day one!

Percona Live 2018 is up and running! We call this day one, but in reality, yesterday was filled with tutorials that provided excellent and practical information on how to get your MySQL, MongoDB, MariaDB and PostgreSQL environments up, running and optimized.

Today we started with keynote presentations from Percona, a technology panel, Oracle and Netflix. You can view the recording of today’s keynotes here.

Percona Welcome

Laurie Coffin (Percona)

Laurie Coffin is Percona’s CMO, and she welcomed everyone to Percona Live Open Source Database Conference 2018 and announced some important items, like downloading the Percona app.

Make sure you download the app to use for the rest of the conference.

Open Source for the Modern Business

Peter Zaitsev (Percona)

As open source database adoption continues to grow in enterprise organizations, the expectations and definitions of what constitutes success continue to change. In today’s environment, it’s no longer a question of which database to use, but which databases do you need, what platforms will you deploy them on, and how do you get them to work together. A single technology for everything is no longer an option; welcome to the polyglot world.

Percona sees a lot of compelling open source projects and trends that interest the community. Peter also announced the beginning or Percona’s PostgreSQL support plans, as well as partnerships with Mesosphere and Microsoft. This makes Percona the only company that supports three of the major cloud providers and four of the major open source database platforms.

Cool Technologies Showcase

Nikolay Samokhvalov (Nombox), Sugu Sougoumarane (PlanetScale Data), Shuhao Wu (Shopify Inc.), Andy Pavlo (Carnegie Mellon University)

In this series of quick talks, we were treated to different perspectives on emerging database technologies:

• Automatization of Postgres Administration. Cloud services like Amazon RDS or Google Cloud SQL help to automate half of DBA tasks: launch database instances, provision replicas, create backups. But for the most part, database tuning and query optimization aren’t. The purpose of automation should be to detect, predict and ultimately prevent database issues.
• High Performance, Scalable, and Available MySQL Clustering System for the Cloud. Multiple companies now use Vitess in production. Vitess shines in this area by providing query logs, transaction logs, information URLs, and status variables that can feed into a monitoring system like Prometheus. Vitess won a MySQL community award last night at the Community Reception.
• Ghostferry: the Swiss Army Knife of Live Data Migrations with Minimum Downtime. Inspired by gh-ost, Ghostferry allows application developers at Shopify to migrate data without assistance from DBAs. They plan to open source Ghostferry at the conference so that anyone can migrate their own data with minimal hassle and downtime.
• What is a Self-Driving Database Management System? People are touting the rise of “self-driving” database management systems (DBMSs). But nobody has clearly defined what it means for a DBMS to be self-driving. Thus, in this keynote, Andy provides the history of autonomous databases and what is needed to make a true self-driving DBMS. Along with a new way to measure how close you are to academic tenure.

State of the Dolphin 8.0

Tomas Ulin (Oracle)

Oracle just announced the availability of MySQL 8.0 GA. Today, Tomas Ulin talked about the focus, strategy, investments and innovations that allow MySQL to provide next-generation Web, mobile, cloud and embedded applications. He also discussed features, fixes and changes in the latest and the most significant MySQL database release ever in its history: MySQL 8.0.

Linux Performance 2018

Brendan Gregg (Netflix)

At over one thousand code commits per week, it’s hard to keep up with Linux developments. This keynote will summarize recent Linux performance features, for a wide audience: the KPTI patches for Meltdown, eBPF for performance observability, Kyber for disk I/O scheduling, BBR for TCP congestion control, and more. This is about exposure: knowing what exists, so you can learn and use it later when needed. Get the most out of your systems, whether they are databases or application servers, with the latest Linux kernels and exciting features.

All the keynotes today highlighted the many different aspects of the open source database community that come together to solve database challenges. Percona Live runs through Wednesday 4/25. Check out tomorrow’s keynotes here, as well as the numerous breakout sessions with top open source database experts.