Welcome to another Percona Live Europe featured talk with Percona Live Europe 2016: Amsterdam speakers! In this series of blogs, we’ll highlight some of the speakers that will be at this year’s conference. We’ll also discuss the technologies and outlooks of the speakers themselves. Make sure to read to the end to get a special Percona Live Europe registration bonus!
In this Percona Live Europe featured talk, we’ll meet Igor Canadi, Software Engineer at Facebook, Inc. His talk will be on Everything you wanted to know about MongoRocks. MongoRocks is MongoDB with RocksDB storage engine. It was developed by Facebook, where it’s used to power mobile backend as a service provider Parse.
I had a chance to speak with Igor and learn a bit more about these questions:
Percona: Give me a brief history of yourself: how you got into database development, where you work, what you love about it?
Igor: After I finished my undergrad at the University of Zagreb in Croatia, I joined University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Masters program. Even though UW-M is famous for its work on databases, during my two years there I worked in a different area. However, as I joined Facebook after school, I heard of a cool new project called RocksDB. Everything about building a new storage engine sounded exciting to me, although I had zero idea how thrilling the ride will actually be. The best part was working with and getting to know amazing people from Facebook, Parse, MongoDB, Percona, and many other companies that are using or experimenting with RocksDB.
Percona: Your talk is called “Everything you wanted to know about MongoRocks.” Briefly, what is MongoRocks and why did it get developed?
Igor: Back in 2014 MongoDB announced that they are building a pluggable storage engine API, which would enable MongoDB users to seamlessly choose a storage engine that works best for their workload. Their first prototype was actually using RocksDB as a storage engine, which was very exciting for us. However, they bought WiredTiger soon after, another great storage engine, and decided to abandon MongoDB+RocksDB project. At the same time, Parse was running into scaling challenges with their MongoDB deployment. We decided to help out and take over the development of MongoRocks. We started rolling it out at Parse in March of 2015 already and completed the rollout in October. Running MongoRocks instead of MongoDB with the MMap storage engine resulted in much greater efficiency and lower latencies in some scenarios. Some of the experiences are captured in Parse’s blog posts: http://blog.parse.com/announcements/mongodb-rocksdb-parse/ and http://blog.parse.com/learn/engineering/mongodb-rocksdb-writing-so-fast-it-makes-your-head-spin/
Percona: What are the workloads and database environments that are best suited for a MongoRocks deployment? Do you see and expansion of the solution to encompass other scenarios?
Igor: Generally speaking, MongoRocks should compress really well. Over the years of using LSM engines, we learned that its compression rates are hard to beat. The difference can sometimes be substantial. For example, many benchmarks of MyRocks, which is a MySQL with RocksDB storage engines, have shown that compressed InnoDB uses two times as much space as compressed RocksDB. With better compression, more of your data fits in memory, which could also improve read latencies and lower the stress on storage media. However, this is a tricky question to answer generally. It really depends on the metrics you care about. One great thing about Mongo and different storage engines is that the replication format is the same across all of them, so it’s simple to try it out and see how it performs under your workload. You can just add an additional node in your replica set that’s using RocksDB and monitor the metric you care about on that node.
Percona: What are the unique database requirements at Facebook that keep you awake at night? What would you most like to see feature-wise in MongoDB in the near future (or any database technology)?
Igor: One of the most exciting database projects that we’re working on at Facebook is MyRocks, which I mentioned previously. Currently, we use MySQL with InnoDB to store our Facebook graph and we are experimenting with replacing that with MyRocks. The main motivation behind the project is 2x better compression rates, but we also see better performance in some areas. If you’re attending Percona Live Europe I encourage you to attend either Mark Callaghan’s talk on MyRocks, or Yoshinori’s 3-hour tutorial to learn more.
Percona: What are looking forward to the most at Percona Live Europe this year?
Igor: The best part of attending conferences is the people. I am looking forward to seeing old friends and meeting new ones. If you like to talk storage engines, hit me up!
You can read more about Igor’s thoughts on MongoRocks at his twitter feed.
Want to find out more about Igor, Facebook and MongoRocks? Register for Percona Live Europe 2016, and come see his talk Everything you wanted to know about MongoRocks.
Use the code FeaturedTalk and receive €25 off the current registration price!
Percona Live Europe 2016: Amsterdam is the premier event for the diverse and active open source database community. The conferences have a technical focus with an emphasis on the core topics of MySQL, MongoDB, and other open source databases. Percona live tackles subjects such as analytics, architecture and design, security, operations, scalability and performance. It also provides in-depth discussions for your high-availability, IoT, cloud, big data and other changing business needs. This conference is an opportunity to network with peers and technology professionals by bringing together accomplished DBA’s, system architects and developers from around the world to share their knowledge and experience. All of these people help you learn how to tackle your open source database challenges in a whole new way.
This conference has something for everyone!
Percona Live Europe 2016: Amsterdam is October 3-5 at the Mövenpick Hotel Amsterdam City Centre.
