Welcome to another post in the series of Percona Live featured tutorial speakers blogs! In these blogs, we’ll highlight some of the tutorial speakers that will be at this year’s Percona Live conference. We’ll also discuss how these tutorials can help you improve your database environment. Make sure to read to the end to get a special Percona Live 2017 registration bonus!
In this Percona Live featured tutorial, we’ll meet Frédéric Descamps, MySQL Community Manager at Oracle. Frédéric is probably better known in the community as “LeFred” (Twitter: @lefred)! His tutorial is MySQL InnoDB Cluster and Group Replication in a Nutshell: Hands-On Tutorial (along with Part 2). Attendees will get their hands on virtual machines and migrate standard Master/Slave architecture to the new MySQL InnoDB Cluster (native Group Replication) with minimal downtime. I had a chance to speak with Frédéric and learn a bit more about InnoDB Cluster and Group Replication:
Percona: How did you get into database technology? What do you love about it?
Frédéric: I started with SQL on VMS and DBASE during my IT courses. I wrote my thesis on SQLServer replication. To be honest, the implementation at the time wasn’t particularly good. At the same time, I enjoyed hacking a Perl module that allowed you to run SQL queries against plain text files. Then I worked as a Progress developer for MFG/Pro (a big customized ERP). When I decided to work exclusively for an open source company, I was managing more and more customers’ databases in MySQL (3.23 and 4.x), so my colleagues and I took MySQL training. It was still MySQL AB at that time. I passed my MySQL 4.1 Core and Professional Certification, and I ended up delivering MySQL Training for MySQL AB too. Some might also remember that I worked for a company called Percona for a while, before moving on to Oracle!
Percona: Your tutorial is called “MySQL InnoDB Cluster & Group Replication in a nutshell: hands-on tutorial.” Why would somebody want to migrate to this technology?
Frédéric: The main reason to migrate to MySQL InnoDB is to achieve high availability (HA) easily for your MySQL database, while still maintaining performance.
Thanks to MySQLShell’s adminAPI, you can create a cluster in less than five minutes. All the management can be done remotely, with just some shell commands. Additionally, for Group Replication our engineers have leveraged existing standard MySQL infrastructures (GTIDs, Multi-Source Replication, Multi-threaded Slave Applier, Binary Logs, etc.), which are already well known by the majority of MySQL DBAs.
Percona: How can moving to a high availability environment help businesses?
Frédéric: Time is money! Many businesses can’t afford downtime anymore. Having a reliable HA solution is crucial for businesses on the Internet. Expectations have changed: users want this to be natively supported inside the database technology versus externally. For example, when I started to work in IT, it was very common to have several maintenance windows during the night. But currently, and almost universally, the customer base is spread worldwide. Any time is during business hours somewhere in the world!
Percona: What do you want attendees to take away from your tutorial session? Why should they attend?
Frédéric: I think that current HA solutions are too complex to setup and manage. They use external tools. In our tutorial, Kenny and I will demonstrate how MySQL InnoDB Cluster, being an internal implementation, is extremely easy to use. We will also cover some scenarios where things go wrong, and how to deal with them. Performance and ease-of-use were two key considerations in the design of InnoDB Cluster.
Percona: What are you most looking forward to at Percona Live?
Frédéric: Like every time I’ve attended, my main goal is to bring to the audience all the new and amazing stuff we are implementing in MySQL. MySQL has evolved quickly these last few years, and we don’t really plan to slow down. I also really enjoy the feedback from users and other MySQL professionals. This helps focus us on what really matters for our users. And finally, it’s a great opportunity to re-connect with ex-colleagues and friends.
You can find out more about Frédéric Descamps and his work with InnoDB Cluster at his Twitter handle @lefred. Register for Percona Live Data Performance Conference 2017, and see his MySQL InnoDB Cluster and Group Replication in a Nutshell: Hands-On Tutorial talk. Use the code FeaturedTalk and receive $30 off the current registration price!
Percona Live Data Performance Conference 2017 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 24-27, 2017 at the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara & The Santa Clara Convention Center.