This blog will review some of the high availability topics featured at this year’s Percona Live Europe, Amsterdam conference.
The topic of high availability MySQL is always hot, because beyond just being available, you also want efficient database manageability. I’m sure you’ve all seen the video by Frederic Descamps talking about the launch of MySQL InnoDB Cluster (built with group replication, with management executed with the new MySQL Shell). MySQL 8.0 going GA will prove for an exciting time for the MySQL world (though all you early adopters should start trying it now, or right after Percona Live Europe Amsterdam!).
With that, I think that a must attend tutorial is MySQL Group Replication in a nutshell: hands-on tutorial by Frederic Descamps and Kenny Gryp. It competes with MySQL High Availability with Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.7 by Alok Pathak, Peter Zaitsev and Krunal Bauskar (Percona XtraDB Cluster Team Lead), however, which I think will also be an interesting session (and you’re going to learn about Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.7 here).
The quality of the sessions this year are extremely high, making tutorial day hard to split up – another reason to bring a colleague to the conference to get the best spread! Remember, if you bring three or more in a group, you qualify for the group discounted rate at registration. Back to tutorial day, in the morning you have the choice of seeing me give Best Practices for MySQL High Availability or checkout the ProxySQL Tutorial by David Turner (Uber), Derek Downey (Pythian), and the author himself René Cannaò (Dropbox/ProxySQL). Frankly I think ProxySQL is the new hotness, so you definitely want to be there in the morning (and it will make a good follow on to the Percona XtraDB Cluster tutorial in the afternoon if you’re looking for a “track”).
On Day 1, there are plenty of talks, but my picks focused around high availability would be:
- Understanding Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.7 Operation and Key Algorithms. You’re probably using Galera Cluster or Percona XtraDB Cluster in production, it would make sense that you also attend the talk about it from an architecture standpoint.
- Use ProxySQL to Improve Your MySQL High Availability Solution. This is a good place to learn about plugging ProxySQL into your architecture so that it can aid your HA solution. Proxies are all the rage these days, and this will be a great talk (I know that Marco spends a lot of time with Rene on pushing the product).
- If you could somehow split yourself, or if you have a colleague, you’ll want to take notes at the Replication Smackdown talk by Ronald Bradford. Go beyond just asynchronous, semi-synchronous and fully synchronous replication here. Incidentally, Ronald also wrote a book about replication (Effective MySQL Replication Techniques In-Depth).
- MySQL Replication: Latest Developments is the must attend session by Luis Soares. Sure, it will focus on MySQL 5.7 (which has had a lot of improvements to replication), but I’m sure there will also be some MySQL 8.0 info here.
- Launching Vitess: How to run YouTube’s MySQL sharding engine by the people that make Vitess. I expect this to be a sell-out session in terms of attendees – who doesn’t dream of becoming YouTube scale, anyway?
On Day 2, I’d probably check out the following:
- MySQL Load Balancers – MaxScale, ProxySQL, HAProxy, MySQL Router & nginx. To achieve HA, you’ll probably need some form of load balancer/proxy in front, so this should be a good overview/comparison.
- ProxySQL Use Case Scenarios. Listen to Alkin Tezuysal and Rene Cannao guide you through how ProxySQL can provide HA with zero downtime, read/write splitting, query rewriting, sharding, query caching, and multiplexing using SSL across data centers.
- As you grow, you’ll find the need to shard (and re-shard). Daniel van Eeden shares how you can do this in, Using multi-source replication in MySQL 5.7 for resharding, where he goes in-depth with the multi-source replication feature and transportable tablespaces.
- Following that is Booking.com’s Eric Herman on, Splitting a Database Without Down-time.
- The PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA is getting a lot more use these days, so why not get with the program? Exploring Percona XtraDB Cluster using Performance Schema by Krunal Bauskar, the Percona XtraDB Cluster lead.
- I’d not skip Comparing Synchronous Replication Solutions in the Cloud by Marco Tusa. The reality is a lot of us are now deploying in the cloud, and much of the reason of fully synchronous replication there is to also provide high availability.
So here’s another “track” like post about what’s coming in Amsterdam in about 2 weeks. There is of course, still time to register. Use the FeaturedTalk code to get a discount.
Amsterdam eWeek
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About the Author
Colin CharlesColin 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.
