The founder of the technology company talked about the future of MySQL

The founder of the technology company talked about the future of MySQL

As the stable version of MySQL 5.7 is approaching its official release, we have joined various MySQL branches to continue to compete for market share. We interviewed Peter Zaitsev, co-founder and CEO of Percona and world-renowned MySQL performance leader, measure the test taker's understanding about the current situation and future of the most popular open source DBMS.

Although Peter has been busy preparing for this year's Percona Live Conference (and also looks forward to Percona's acquisition of Tokutek !), However, he still talked about the major trend of MySQL, the pain points Percona has been dealing with recently, and the significant impact of DevOps and cloud on the relationship between developers and DBAs.

Close relationship between MySQL and OpenStack

First, it was a gossip: This year Percona launched OpenStack Live, a new activity synchronized with Percona Live. The most direct reason was that Percona held a one-day OpenStack open day last year, with a very enthusiastic response, so they decided to upgrade and create a new conference.

This is interesting in itself-MySQL users should be enthusiastic about infrastructure as a service (IaaS. When I asked Peter about more in-depth connections between Percona and OpenStack, he pointed out two clear synergies: (1) MySQL is the most popular data storage method in the cloud, therefore, many OpenStack users are using MySQL. (2) Multiple OpenStack components are using MySQL. (If you have not used OpenStack, you may have to wait for a short time: we are going to release a new Refcard running on OpenStack in a few days !)

Importance of Open Source primary data storage

However, Peter's enthusiasm for OpenStack exceeded the overlap with the high availability of MySQL. There are two other intersections in our conversation.

First, Percona's XtraDB Cluster can support OpenStack well. Secondly, the OpenStack Foundation firmly supports open-source; implements full-stack IaaS -- and, as Peter pointed out, percona's mission is to implement various MySQL version features (Pluggable Authentication, review, ultra-large scale connection, etc.) in an open-source solution ).

Peter raised an important point about open-source DBMS: your primary data storage is heavily constrained by suppliers-I feel like I should be able to understand this, but I have never worried about this problem, I have never used an open-source database that is more powerful than the MySQL Community version. Theoretically, however, the increasing number of MySQL branches may be evidence that more and more users are aware of this problem.

Lean entrepreneurship and cloud computing

MySQL and cloud services also share the same important role: they are very convenient for precision entrepreneurship. Most startups may have used MySQL before, so their experience can easily continue. MySQL is so mature that sometimes DBA is an unnecessary role (at least at the beginning ). Cloud data provides a similar streamlined commitment: "No DBA is required! No O & M required !" However, Peter found that companies that "do not require DBA" cannot support expansion. (I once agreed that DBA should be hired only when necessary .) In the end, a DBA is required for a startup company that uses Cloud Technologies the most thoroughly. It may not be a full-time DBA, or it may not be a full-time DBA for a period of time. It may also belong to the "on-demand service" Role of DBA itself, such as Percona. (Of course, I feel a little lost about "DBA as a service. However, on the other hand, I absolutely agree that a real, professional, and experienced DBA should be too many part-time staff ......)

Who is driving the development of DBMS: first developers and then DBAs

Now we know that it is silly to map all domains to the same storage model. However, I want to know a mainstream DBMS vendor's point of view on the actual growth of DBMS; or, what makes them grow in some specific ways? Peter's reply was very direct: In the early stages of the DBMS life cycle, it was driven by developers (the current MongoDB is like this ). However, as DBMS matures, features will be driven by operators.

For a long time, MySQL was also like this-for example, Percona Server first released a series of performance enhancement patches for MySQL 5.1, but eventually NoSQL DBMS has the same trend, because they all encounter problems in large-scale and highly available solutions.

In this regard, I asked Peter a question: how does Percona replace InnoDB XtraDB to improve InnoDB performance? I want to talk about the concept of B-tree and log-structure merging Tree, which is known by computer scientists with a university diploma. I certainly know the actual working method of the storage engine Peter said. However, I have to admit that, as a user, I still cannot understand the technical concepts involved in InnoDB Optimization-at least I cannot understand it before the next topic begins.