mysql-2013-6934_Small

No need to say that as many others I have enjoy this conference a lot.

For me was also a personal success because I was finally able to have my company sponsoring the event and bring new members of my team to the conference as speakers, obviously all their merit, but I was happy as responsible of the MySQL cluster in Pythian knowing how much have cost to them to be there.

We also had a lot of people at the community dinner, last head count I did was over 120 people. In this regard I have to clarify some misunderstanding and confusion we had there.

Pedro’s requests to us to have the last head count by Tuesday morning, given that I have closed the count from the comments in the web-site and from the emails around noon. The number I pass to Pedro’s base on that was of 70-80 people, but we had additional people registering after that time and also last moment show, given that we have to manage additional 40 people that has to be located in different areas. Quite obvious that I did not give clear enough instructions, I personally apology for that, I (we) will do better next year. I hope you had good time and good food also if a little bit detach from the other tables.

What about the conference?

My feeling is that this event consolidates what is the “core” of the MySQL community.

We have seen many companies providing the same service, one close to the other sitting and talking with positive spirit and attitude. I have been personally chatting all the time with people from SkySQL, Percona and others, all of us with open and friendly attitude.

I have seen Oracle people participate to the conference (hurray!!!), as IOUG committee member I know very well the number of time we have said to Oracle to be there, and they were! This was good, period.

MySQL where are you going?

In relation of what is happening to MySQL, and where is that leading us, I have confirm my idea that nowadays we are not talking anymore of LAMP or Full stack, when we talk about MySQL.

What customers, companies and users are expecting is a more complex and articulate environment. Interaction between different blocks is now not an optional but a fact.

When we approach an existing environment or when we have to build a new one, we now think in term of hundreds of application servers, terabytes of data to store or to process, many different client platform to support and impressive amount of data to analyze for reporting.

Feel free to fill the boxes with the name of the product that you like most, but for sure you will not limit yourself to MySQL or LAMP.

Already today I have customers using MySQL, Oracle Database, MongoDB, Hadoop and more, all in one single connected environment.

Thinking in term of MySQL only when we think to product, service, monitoring or design is too limitative.

For instance a tools that monitor MySQL but do not catch his interaction with other element like Hadoop, is going to provide only part of the picture. That partial picture referring only to MySQL metrics will be close to be useless because it will not be able to provide all the require information needed to perform a valid analysis and eventually projection.

In other terms will cover the basic of the single block and will not help us to get the big picture. That is it, still useful to keep the block in decent state but will let you blind for what is going on in the whole context.

This is for many aspects true also for the products, each block, MySQL included, must become more and more flexible to exchange data with the others. This can be achieve developing specific interfaces, or by defining a common protocol/format of communication that is shared between the different blocks.

In MySQL universe (or MariaDB), this also means to keep consistency and to remain as open as possible to facilitate the creation of additional plug-in/engines.

But what really worries me, given also is “my” field, is “service”. Those environments require support, design and so on. We know very well how complex a MySQL environment could be, what about it when we start to have many other actors involve? What really scares me is the level of knowledge is required to cover all of them or just a segment.

I am convince that we will have to work around it, because users/customers/companies will ask us to provide the support for all the element in their architecture, actually it is already happening, and the real risk is to have or become generalist instead of high profile experts.

If you don’t do it, if you do not differentiate, the risk is to be isolate by the market, and yes be very smart on that specific area, but not able to understand the big picture, ergo useless.

On the other hand, trying to do too much could drives you (as company) to disperse the resource and have an average level, that is good but not Excellent with capital “E”.

The possible solution is to have a huge monster with hundred and hundred of people, and division per technology … and … well I have seen already several of them starting and die. Starting good with very high service quality and then become big, heavy and so slow that customers moves out.

No that is not the solution, solution reside in being able to balance correctly what you can do with your resources, and reasonable growth, and what not.

I am working in a multi technology company, and I know very well of what I am talking about when I say that balance is the key. The future will need to see two things: one is the companies improving their capacity to cover more then just MySQL, the other is open the space to collaboration, company covering different technologies must start to interact more, and offer better service and results to the users/customers in a cooperative way.

That will allow the single company to remain focus on few things and keep a high level of expertise on the chosen areas. Working in a cooperative way is the key.

All this needs to happen, and require coordination.

Flexibility and coordination are the keywords for the future. The MySQL community have shown already how much energy it has, how strong it could be in difficult moment and how much we really care about our customer/users.

What I see for the future is us working all together gathering all the actors involve, and give life to a new ecosystem which will help to facilitate the evolution of the next generation of data and applications.

What about the Speeches

In term of talks I have to say I was expecting a little bit more, not from the speakers only (me included), but also from the product companies.

As said I think is time to move to the next step and I was expecting more talks about interactions between technologies.

I am not saying that we should not cover the base; we must do it, but having more talks on how MySQL and MongoDB coexist, or how we could help Terabytes of data to be process between A and B; well that would have be nice.

Not only as what we have now, but also what we are planning for the future, including new features and ideas for the development.

In this regards the only relevant speeches I have seen were, the ones done by my colleague Danil Zburivsky on Hadoop/MySQL , and the other about Json by Anders Karlsson during the MariaDB/SkySQL event.

Thanks guys you see the future, and shame on Marco that was thinking about it and could have done it but did not … may be for the next conference.

Said that, the level of the speeches was good, I have being talking with the people attending, most of them satisfy, but let us wait and see what the evaluations will reveal.

What I can say is that I really enjoy the tutorial on Xtradb and Galera done by Jay Janssen, that helps me to feel less alone in the Galera implementation adventure; and I regret to have miss the “InnoDB: A journey to the core” by Davi Arnaut and Jeremy Cole. But I was presenting at the same slot, and would have not be nice for me to say to the people there, ok let us move all to the next room.

What about the Expo

WoooW, first time as sponsor and first time with a boot. A lot of talk, a lot of possible new friends and a better understanding on what we need to do to be more effective next time. T-shirts first!!! Lesson learned we bring to few … we could have cover all the bay area with LOVE YOUR DATA, we miss the target this year, we will not do the same the next one.

I think that this year we had a well-balanced expo, with less show, but more focus, I must also mention the presence outside the expo area of Julian Cash (http://jceventphoto.com/index.html), which takes a lot of cool shot of most of us.

I know Julian was there also during other conferences but I never met him before. I did this year and was a great experience, I hate to takes photos but with Julian I was having so much fun that at the end I love it.

What about the Lightening Talks?

Another well establish event at MySQL conference, and every year we have fun. This year I have enjoy the Shlomi one, and absolutely AWSOME was the performance from the Tokutek team.

About the Lightening talks and just to confirm what Dave Apgar was saying in his really good presentation, shit happens and you never know when. I had place my video camera and register the WHOLE event, and guess what… my new SD card just failed, and nothing I mean NOTHING was there after. Next time I will come with TWO video cameras and will setup redundancy!

Announcements

Finally during the conference we had two very significant announcements.

The first one was the expected merge of MariaDB and SkySQL, nothing new, but it is good to see that SkySQL is defining his identity with more determination, but not only this merge is very important because all MariaDB users now have a clear referring point, that will hep them and the community to better adopt and improve MariaDB. Way to go guys well done!

The second one is about Tokutek (http://www.tokutek.com/), finally open source. I have tested it the first time 3 years ago, and was a very interesting technology, but hard to have implemented because customers where reluctant to go for non-open source code.

Just a note, I wrote open source, not free. Open source doesn’t mean free, and here the concept was very clear, customers were willing to “eventually” pay, but not for close code.

Tokutek move is not only smart because will allow the company to have substantial help from the community in identify issues, improve utilization and identify new trends, but it is smart also because remove the last philosophical barrier in the software adoption.

From the technical point of view, the presentations have shown a significant improvement in respect to the previous years, and I was very impress from the presentation done by Gerry Narvaja during the SkySQL/MariaDB event.

One thing is sure, I have customers that could take huge benefit from Tokutek and I will give a try right away starting next week.

Winner and looser

No doubt from my side, I was not even mentioning before because for me is a given.

On the 12 of March 2011 I have written this article http://www.tusacentral.net/joomla/index.php/mysql-blogs/96-a-dream-on-mysql-parallel-replication, which was my dream about replication. At the time of writing I was not aware/testing ANY software able to do what I was asking.

On the 23 November 2011 I wrote another article http://www.tusacentral.net/joomla/index.php/mysql-blogs/119-galera-on-red-hat-is-123-part-1, and that was my first approach with Galera.

On the 29 September 2012 I have presented the first results of a POC done on customer environment http://www.slideshare.net/marcotusa/scaling-with-sync-replication-2012.

Next week, I must implement another MySQL Cluster, base on Galera replication.

The winner for me is the Galera solution (http://www.codership.com/), whatever version you may like; from my side I have found that the Percona version is the more stable, and using the Severalnines tool to manage the cluster (http://www.severalnines.com/clustercontrol) is also helpful.

Who is the looser then?

All the ones that have believe MySQL was over on the 2010 (Oracle take over).

We have MySQL from Oracle, we have MariaDB from Monty, we have companies developing their storage engines and tools, we have a more complex ecosystem that is growing day by day.

No MySQL is not over at all.

One note only, whoever leads the development from any side, reminds that you MUST allow the community to use and develop code on top of yours, modify interfaces without documenting, or not be fully explicit on what to do, how to do, and which direction, well it is not fair.

Percona Live, MySQL Conference in Santa Clara was a great conference, done by great people. We can do better all of us, always, but what makes me feel good is that I know we will do better next year.