Join Percona Chief Evangelist Colin Charles as he covers happenings, gives pointers and provides musings on the open source database community.

Happy New Year. Here’s to 2018 being a great year in the open source database world. What is in store for us? Probably: MySQL 8.0 and MariaDB Server 10.3 as generally available. What will we see in the rest of the space? Clouds? All I know is that we move fast, and it’s going to be fun to see what unfolds.

The biggest news this week may not necessarily be database related; it focused on CPU security vulnerabilities and the potential slowdowns of your servers once the updates are applied. Please do read Meltdown and Spectre: CPU Security Vulnerabilities. Peter Zaitsev himself, got quoted in …

Let’s look at some of the most popular Percona Database Performance Blog posts in 2017.

The closing of a year lends itself to looking back. And making lists. With the Percona Database Performance Blog, Percona staff and leadership work hard to provide the open source community with insights, technical support, predictions and metrics around multiple open source database software technologies. We’ve had over three and a half million visits to the blog in 2017: thank you! We look forward to providing you with even better articles, news and information in 2018.

As 2017 moves into 2018, let’s take a quick look back at some of the most popular posts on the blog this year.

Top 10 Most Read

These posts had the most number of views (working down from the highest):

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Percona is extending the Percona Live 2018 call for papers deadline to January 12, 2018!

Percona’s gift to you this holiday season is the gift of time – submit your speaking topics right up until January 12, 2018!

As the year winds up, we received many requests to extend the Percona Live Open Source Database Conference 2018 call for papers. Since many speakers wanted to submit during the week that they’re planning vacations (from Christmas until New Year’s Day), we realized that December 22 was too soon.

If you haven’t submitted already, please consider doing so. Speaking at …

Join Percona Chief Evangelist Colin Charles as he covers happenings, gives pointers and provides musings on the open source database community.

I highly recommend submitting to the CFP for Percona Live Santa Clara 2018 even though it only closes December 22 2017. By the 3rd week of December, i.e. before the CfP closes, it is very likely that we will announce some of the schedule. So get in early! Keep in mind the broad topics, there are some ideas here.

Also: we are looking for sponsors for Percona Live – you can email me for more information.

Releases

• MongoDB 3.6 …

Join Percona Chief Evangelist Colin Charles as he covers happenings, gives pointers and provides musings on the open source database community.

The CFP for Percona Live Santa Clara 2018 closes December 22, 2017: please consider submitting as soon as possible. We want to make an early announcement of talks, so we’ll definitely do a first pass even before the CFP date closes. Keep in mind the expanded view of what we are after: it’s more than just MySQL and MongoDB. And don’t forget that with one day less, there will be intense competition to fit all the content in.

A new book on MySQL Cluster is out: Pro MySQL NDB Cluster by Jesper Wisborg Krogh and Mikiya Okuno. At 690 pages, it is a weighty tome, and something I fully plan on reading, considering I haven’t played with …

Join Percona Chief Evangelist Colin Charles as he covers happenings, gives pointers and provides musings on the open source database community.

So we have announced the call for presentations for Percona Live Santa Clara 2018. Please send your submissions in!

As you probably already know, we have been expanding the content to be more than just MySQL and MongoDB. It really does include more open source databases: the whole of 2016 had a “time series” theme to it, and we of course love to have more PostgreSQL content (there have been tracks dedicated to PostgreSQL for sometime now). I found this one comment interesting recently, from John Arundel, “If you’re going to learn one database really well, make it Postgres.” I have been noticing newer developers jump on the …

Announcing the opening of the Percona Live Open Source Database Conference 2018 in Santa Clara, CA, call for papers. It will be open from now until December  22, 2017.

Our theme is “Championing Open Source Databases,” with topics of MySQL, MongoDB and other open source databases, including PostgreSQL, time series databases and RocksDB. Sessions tracks include Developers, Operations and Business/Case Studies.

We’re looking forward to your submissions! We want proposals that cover the many aspects and current trends of using open source databases, including design practices, application development, performance optimization, HA and clustering, cloud, containers and new technologies, as well as new and …

Join Percona Chief Evangelist Colin Charles as he covers happenings, gives pointers and provides musings on the open source database community.

We’re close to opening up the call for papers for Percona Live Santa Clara 2018 and I expect this to happen next week. We also have a committee all lined up and ready to vote on submissions.

In other news, I’ve spent some time preparing for the Korean MySQL Power Group meetup to be held in Seoul this Saturday, 11 November 2017. This is a great opportunity for us to extend our reach in Asia. This meetup gathers together top DBAs from Internet companies that use MySQL and related technologies.

Gartner has released their Magic Quadrant …

In this blog, I’ll use ClickHouse and Tabix to look at a new very large dataset for research.

It is hard to come across interesting datasets, especially a big one (and by big I mean one billion rows or more). Before, I’ve used on-time airline performance available from BUREAU OF TRANSPORTATION STATISTICS. Another recent example is NYC Taxi and Uber Trips data, with over one billion records.

However, today I wanted to mention an interesting dataset I found recently that has been available since 2015. This is Reddit’s comments and submissions dataset, made possible thanks to Reddit’s generous API. The …

In this blog post, I’ll look at a comparison of PostgreSQL and MySQL.

I came across a post from Hans-Juergen Schoenig, a Postgres consultant at Cybertec. In it, he dismissed MySQL and showed Postgres as better. While his post ignores most of the reasons why MySQL is better, I will focus on where his post is less than accurate. Testing for MySQL was done with Percona Server 5.7, defaults.

Mr. Schoenig complains that MySQL changes data types automatically. He claims inserting 1234.5678 into a numeric(4, 2) column on Postgres produces an error, and that MySQL just rounds the number to fit. In my testing I found this to be a false claim:

mysql> CREATE TABLE data (
    -> id    integer NOT NULL, …