The last week of September the Percona Live Europe conference happened in Dublin, Ireland. After two years in Amsterdam they decided it was time for something new and Ireland was the place to be for all open-source database technologies.
Pythian could of course not be missing from this conference and we had number of great sessions scheduled for the conference.
I was, as a brand new Pythianite, very excited to be part of the team that went to Dublin and to be able to present a project I helped realizing at my previous employer before moving to Pythian: Rolling out Database-as-a-Service using ProxySQL and Orchestrator. Giving a presentation like that is always a little more stressful when the lead-author of one of the tools you’ll be presenting about is present in the room, but GitHub’s Shlomi Noach, lead-author of Orchestrator, gave me some good constructive feedback. So I was very relieved and happy when I was done!
The conference itself was quite a bit smaller than the US version in April but the content was of a very high standard. ProxySQL, the open-source, high-performance proxy for MySQL, by René Cannaò was the talk of the town with no less than 11 sessions or tutorials having this project in their title. René did, after all, deliver a very good product to the community and he keeps improving it by releasing new versions with new features every few months. Recent additions include clustering the proxy-instances, support for the ClickHouse column store database and even having the proxy act as a sqlite-server.
Other things that were hot during this conference were the new features for MySQL 8.0. Oracle released the 8.0.3 release candidate on Sept 21st, just prior to the conference, and the Oracle team came to talk about new features like the CTEs and Window-functions and the NoSQL Document store capabilities. Also MySQL Community Manager, Frédéric Descamps (a.k.a. lefred) talked about the InnoDB Cluster they released earlier this year.
Last but not least ClickHouse seems to be the rising star when it comes to open source column stores. Tom Arnfeld from CloudFlare presented a keynote presentation on how they moved their real time DNS analytics to ClickHouse with 8M+ inserts per second and throughput of over 4GB/sec. Impressive statistics by my watch.
To conclude this review I would like to thank the conference committee for all the work they do and the time they invest to review all the submissions so we can have some great content on conferences like this. See you all in Santa Clara in April 2018?
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