The Percona Live conference was held this past Wednesday in New York, and I had the chance to attend. Percona is one of the most respected and largest MySQL consulting firms in the world, whose work I’ve been following for years on their blog. They even have their own version of MySQL with a large number of additions that are folded into later versions of MySQL by Oracle, and their own backup tool – xtrabackup. Now with the background out of the way, on to the talks:
- Ideeli – a deal a day website that ‘DDoSes themselves every day at noon’. They went into some detail about their EC2/EBS setup, namely the best practices when working with EBS volumes, planning for high availability by making use of Amazon’s different Availability Zones, and some interesting tweaks to use for large MySQL instances running on EC2.
- Baron Schwartz from Percona – a great demonstration of how you can use tcpdump, Maatkit and gnuplot to do non-intrusive monitoring and find problems with locked up queries before they start to cause you real problems. He also showed how you can make a real plan for scaling, at the same time proving why linear scalability is almost always impossible.
- Zmanda – open source backup software that allows you to do point in time MySQL backups via a variety of methods, i.e. a full backup via LVM/ZFS/EBS snapshot and then append replays from binary logging. Definitely cool stuff.
- Facebook – the closing keynote was from one of Facebook’s DB performance team members who spoke about their gigantic MySQL setup, how they deal with sharding and remote references and all sorts of crazy stuff that you only know about once you’ve run the world’s largest MySQL cluster. They actually run two instances of MySQL on single machines as they’re no longer IO bound due to their work with flashcache. It gave me a lot of ideas on how we can deal with expansion in the future.
There’s no amount of reading manuals and whitepapers that can replace real world experience, and hearing community members explain how they’ve overcome various obstacles and emergencies can really help you think about how you’re managing your environment. Thanks again to Percona for organizing as well as all the speakers for making their presentations.