Percona Performance AAR

So we've been there.

In my opinion the conference was a great success. Our presentation was not, but that's another story. Percona really showed what conferencing is about. Don't know about MySQL. It was behind the closed doors. Valiant guardians strictly watched that you didn't overhear a word of Sacred Knowledge. Hell, even to get to the Expo hall you had to pay $25 (that's right, you had to pay for watching advertisement) and surrender information about your private life, like your phone number and how you learned about the Expo. Of all this information only your name and your company is reflected on the pass. You can only guess what they, at MySQL, do with the rest. Perhaps, after this Oracle move they all plan to switch from software development to private detective career.

The backside of the pass card reads:Your name, email address, job title, organization, address and phone number are encoded on this card. Please recycle this card at the end of the conference.

But we were there on business, so paying $25 was justified, and I managed to overwhelm the horrible registration UI. We had useful discussions at Drupal and RightScale booths. Perhaps the most fascinating (and overlooked) product was presented by ST Global: Spider storage engine for MySQL, which makes transparent sharding possible. Check their presentation, it's really worth it.

But back to Percona Performance conference because that's where it was at. SSDs and sharding is all the rage. While the latter is understandable, I still don't get what the former has to do with databases. It is just a faster IO. I can see why 16 cores call for new DB approaches, but faster IO? It just makes things faster, that's it, ne?

Presentation topics varied greatly, from storage engine internals to optimizing CSS. And rightfully so. As many presenters stressed, performance is what the end user perceives and, just like a chain is as strong as its weakest link, application performance is as fast as its slowest layer, and as soon as you have dealt with one bottleneck, there is another popping up, in completely different place. So it was nice to see presentations dealing with all aspects of performance.

Replication. Replication is asynchronous and master-slave only. So they just call it "the Replication". Hence presentation titles like: "Fighting MySQL Replication Lag" or "MySQL Replication: Getting The Most From Slaves". It seems that "synchronous replication" is akin to yeti: everybody knows the term, but no one has seen it, let alone used in production. Apparently existing synchronous replication solutions are believed to be so inefficient and limited that the whole concept is dismissed as impractical.

This is a slightly sad state of affairs. On one hand it might seem encouraging that there is little competition. On the other hand, who would buy into yeti software?

At Codership it is our task to break this misconception.