Percona Live featured talk with Ying Qiang Zhang — What’s new in AliSQL: Alibaba’s branch of MySQL

Welcome to the next Percona Live featured talk with Percona Live Data Performance Conference 2016 speakers! In this series of blogs, we’ll highlight some of the speakers that will be at this year’s conference, as well as discuss the technologies and outlooks of the speakers themselves. Make sure to read to the end to get a special Percona Live registration bonus!

In this Percona Live featured talk, we’ll meet Ying Qiang Zhang, Database Kernel Expert for the Alibaba Group. His talk will be What’s new in AliSQL — Alibaba’s branch of MySQL. This session introduces the Alibaba Group’s branch of the Oracle MySQL — AliSQL. In this session, we will learn about how AliSQL can support 140,000 order creations per second.  I had a chance to speak with Ying and learn a bit more about AliSQL:

Percona: Give me a brief history of yourself: how you got into database development, where you work, what you love about it.

Ying: My first step in my MySQL journey began in my graduate student period. I participated in lots of projects using MySQL as storage. At that time, I thought MySQL was a masterpiece of computer science theory and a well-demonstrated engineering implementation of a real RDBMS. By referencing MySQL source code, I solved many problems in my project.

Before joining the Alibaba group, I was a MySQL Kernel developer at Baidu Co., Ltd. I joined the Alibaba group in 2014 as the developer and maintainer of AliSQL, a MySQL fork of Alibaba.

The dramatic growth of Alibaba’s E-Commerce business puts extremely harsh demands on our database system. AliSQL faces bigger and bigger challenges. I like the challenges, and have tried my best to make AliSQL faster, safer and more scalable – which in turn makes our OLTP system more efficient and smooth.

Percona: Your talk is going to be on “What’s new in AliSQL – Alibaba’s branch of MySQL” So this was a version of MySQL that was put together specifically for the Alibaba group’s online commerce? What prompted that need and why a special MySQL implementation?

Ying: AliSQL is a fork of MySQL integrated with Alibaba’s business characteristics and requirements (based on a community version). The primary incentive of maintaining this fork are:

1. As the largest E-Commerce platform in the world, the throughput of Alibaba’s online transaction processing system is huge, especially on days like Alibaba Singles’ Day shopping festival (China’s version of “Cyber Monday” or “Black Friday”). The databases behind the OLTP system faces the challenge of high throughput, high concurrency and low latency at the same time (requirements the community version of MySQL cannot meet).
2. Under the high-stress scenarios, we found some MySQL bugs impact system stability. We couldn’t wait for new releases of the community version to fix these bugs. Usually we will have to fix the bugs with very limited time, and then we will report the bugs as well as the patch to community.
3. In Alibaba, the differences between the responsibilities of an application developer and database administrator are significant. We have a very professional DBA team, and DBAs are well aware of the database system and need more features to manipulate MySQL: flow control, changing/controlling execution plan, controlling the watermark, setting blacklist without the involvement of application developer, etc. And the community version of MySQL lacks these features. The private cloud user needs these features even more than a public cloud user.

Percona: Are there differences in the online processing experience in China that are different than other countries? Especially for the Singles’ Day event?

Ying: China has huge population base and huge netizen base. With the rapid growth of China’s economy, the purchasing power of Chinese netizen is stronger and stronger. According to published data, Alibaba’s sales during Singles’ Day shopping festival 2014 was 8.99 billion USD, which was almost five times more than Cyber Monday or Black Friday’s online sales in the United States for the same year. In 2015, the amount reached 14.3 billion USD. Alibaba’s E-Commerce platform sales were one billion RMB at the first 1 minute and 12 seconds of Singles’ Day 2015. Millions of people are trying to buy the same commodity at the same time usually on that day. This is a huge challenge for the Alibaba’s online transaction processing system, and of course, for the databases sitting in the backend.

Percona: What do you see as an issue that we the database community needs to be on top of with AliSQL? What keeps you up at night with regard to the future of MySQL?

Ying: In my opinion, as an open source project MySQL has been focused on single users or the public cloud users (the “M” of “LAMP”). But with the growth of MySQL, we need to pay more attention to enterprise and big private cloud users. Some features such as administration, scalable cluster solutions, and performance optimizations for extreme scenarios are essential to enterprise users.

Percona: What are you most looking forward to at Percona Live Data Performance Conference 2016?

Ying: I am looking forward to communicating with MySQL users from all over the world, to see if we can help the community to grow even bigger with my two little cents. I am also looking forward to making more friends in the MySQL world.

You can read more about AliSQL at Ying’s website: zhangyingqiang.com.

Want to find out more about Ying and AliSQL? Register for Percona Live Data Performance Conference 2016, and see his talk What’s new in AliSQL — Alibaba’s branch of MySQL. Use the code “FeaturedTalk” and receive $100 off the current registration price!

Percona Live Data Performance Conference 2016 is the premier open source event for the data performance ecosystem. It is the place to be for the open source community as well as businesses that thrive in the MySQL, NoSQL, cloud, big data and Internet of Things (IoT) marketplaces. Attendees include DBAs, sysadmins, developers, architects, CTOs, CEOs, and vendors from around the world.

The Percona Live Data Performance Conference will be April 18-21 at the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara & The Santa Clara Convention Center.