This Week in Data with Colin Charles 46: OSCON Recap, Google Site Reliability Workbook

July 27, 2018

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Colin Charles

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MongoDB

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Join Percona Chief Evangelist Colin Charles as he covers happenings, gives pointers and provides musings on the open source database community.

OSCON happened last week and was incredible. It is true there was less of a database focus, and a lot more topics covered. In fact, you’d have found it hard to find database content. There was plenty of interesting content around AI/ML, cloud, SRE, blockchain and more. As a speaker, the 40-minute sessions that included a Q and A session was quite compact (I felt it was a little too short, and many speakers sped up towards the end). I guess it will make for more blog content.

The conference’s open source ethos is still extremely strong, and the keynotes exemplified that. It was not just the 20th anniversary of OSCON, but also the 20th anniversary of the Open Source Initiative (OSI). Percona is a sponsor (and I am an individual member). From a sponsor standpoint, Home Depot had a huge booth, but so did the NSA – who, along with giving out stickers, were actively recruiting. Readers might recall mention of NSA’s involvement with LemonGraph and the other data open source data projects from column 43.

Google just released The Site Reliability Workbook, which looks like the full PDF (“launch day edition”) of their new book. It includes practical ways to implement SRE. You can pre-order the book, and the official release date is August 4, 2018. This should be the best companion to Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems, which I highly recommend reading first before getting to the workbook. After a quick perusal of the new release, I can say I like it — the case studies from Evernote and Home Depot, are all very interesting from a database standpoint (MySQL, Cloud SQL). Plenty of information is relevant if you’re a Prometheus user as well. I say skim the PDF, and devour the book!

Releases

pg_chameleon 2.0.8 – a MySQL to PostgreSQL replica system written in Python 3. Fairly interesting as it pulls row images, stores them in PostgreSQL as JSONB, with a function then decoding and replaying the values into PostgreSQL. Migration tools are much better when they are automated!

MariaDB Connector/Node.js Alpha – I think this is a big deal, since MariaDB Corporation is now focusing not just on C, Java and ODBC but also node.js. This is in direct competition with the Oracle MySQL offering of MySQL Connector/Node.js.

MySQL for PCF v2 – if you are using Pivotal Cloud Foundry, their v2 release of MySQL now comes with Percona Server v5.7.20-21 using leader/follower replication. Version 1 launched with MariaDB Galera Cluster. A hint as to why would be in Marco Nicosia’s excellent talk at Percona Live, Highway Safety: Street Signs to Watch For When Running Galera Clusters.

Link List

Default options in MyRocks – yes please, we need to make MyRocks easier to use out-of-the-box!

A small dive into the MySQL 8.0 X-DevAPI – read towards the end, get to the bonus, which tells you how to use the X-DevAPI on Google Cloud Functions! Well, hello serverless.

Real-time Data Masking using MariaDB – I got to see the talk at FOSSASIA, and now everyone gets to read the excellent post from Pandikrishnan Gurusamy, of Lazada fame (part of the Alibaba Group now).

How to Analyze Billions of Records per Second on a Single Desktop PC – I’m sure you’ve seen Percona being bullish on ClickHouse, but here’s some interesting work on LocustDB.

Industry Updates

Elastic is on a spree of grabbing folk – Massimo Brignoli (ex-MongoDB, SkySQL, Oracle, and MySQL) joins as a Principal Solutions Architect, and Gerardo Narvaja joins as Sr. Solutions Architect for Pacific Northwest. He departs MariaDB Corporation, and has previously been at Tokutek, Pythian and MySQL.

Morgan Tocker (LinkedIn) has joined PingCAP as Senior Product & Community Manager. Previously he was both product manager and community manager at Oracle for MySQL, had a stint at Percona and also was at the original MySQL AB.