Serverless is a new buzzword in the database industry. Even though it gets tossed around often, there is some confusion about what it really means and how it really works. Serverless architectures rely on third-party Backend as a Service (BaaS) services. They can also include custom code that is run in managed, ephemeral containers on a Functions as a Service (FaaS) platform. In comparison to traditional Platform as a Service (PaaS) server architecture, where you pay a predetermined sum for your instances, serverless applications benefit from reduced costs of operations and lower complexity. They are also considered to be more agile, allowing for reduced engineering efforts.

In reality, there are still servers in a serverless architecture: they are just being used, managed, and maintained outside of the application. But isn’t that a lot like what cloud providers, such as Amazon RDS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure, are already …

The requirements for managing and running a database in a modern enterprise have evolved over the past ten years. Those in charge of running enterprise databases have seen their focus shift from ensuring access and availability, to architecture, design and scalability responsibilities. Web-first companies pioneered the change by charging site reliability engineers (SRE’s) or multi-faceted DBAs with the task of ensuring that the company’s main revenue engine not only stayed up, but could scale to wherever the business needed to go. This is a far cry from the classic enterprise DBA’s top responsibilities: keep it up, keep it backed up, and react to issues as they present themselves.

Today, enterprises look for new revenue models to keep up with a shifting technology paradigm driven by the cloud. The requirements and needs for managing their database environments are changing along with this shift. In the SaaS world, application outages …

In this blog post on Percona Live 2018 sessions, we’ll talk with Shuhoa Wu, Software Developer for Shopify, Inc. about how Ghostferry is the Swiss Army knife of live data migrations.

Existing tools like mysqldump and replication cannot migrate data between GTID-enabled MySQL and non-GTID-enabled MySQL – a common configuration across multiple cloud providers that cannot be changed. These tools are also cumbersome to operate and error-prone, thus requiring a DBA’s attention for each data migration. Shopify’s team introduced a tool that allows for easy migration of data between MySQL databases with constant downtime on the order of seconds.

Inspired by gh-ost, their tool is named Ghostferry and allows application developers at Shopify to migrate data without assistance …

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Today, keeping your enterprise agile and flexible is not just an advantage, it is a requirement. Many of the systems and processes once controlled by businesses onsite are moving offsite to “service” models. This includes Platform as a Service (PaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Database as a Service (DBaaS), etc.

These services are usually referred to as being in the cloud. The enterprise using the service doesn’t maintain or manage the infrastructure of the service in question.

Migrating database workloads to the cloud can be a vital part of improving customer experience, gaining deeper business insights and increasing efficiency. More enterprises are …

Building on community

Percona is very committed to open source database software. We think of ourselves as unbiased champions of open source database solutions. With that, we also carry a responsibility to the open source database community – whether MySQL®, MongoDB®, ProxySQL or other open source database technology. We’ve seen that, and taken action by hiring a Community Manager.

That’s me. Which is great… For me!

And my job, in a nutshell, is to help to make our community great for you. By building on the good stuff that’s been done in the past and finding ways to do more.

The common thread tying the community together is the sharing of information, experience, and knowledge. Hundreds of you have taken part in Percona Live or Percona Live Europe — thank you for that! …

Percona latest blog poll asks how you currently host applications and databases. Select an option below, or leave a comment to clarify your deployment!

With the increased need for environments that respond more quickly to changing business demands, many enterprises are moving to the cloud and hosted deployments for applications and software in order to offload development and maintenance overhead to a third party. The database is no exception. Businesses are turning to using database as a service (DBaaS) to handle their data needs.

DBaaS provides some obvious benefits:

• Offload physical infrastructure to another vendor. It is the responsibility of whoever is providing the DBaaS service to maintain the physical environment – including hardware, software and best …

Join Percona’s Chief Evangelist, Colin Charles as he presents Databases in the Hosted Cloud on Wednesday, October 4, 2017, at 7:00 am PDT / 10:00 am EDT (UTC-7).

Register Now

Today you can use hosted MySQL/MariaDB/Percona Server for MySQL/PostgreSQL in several “cloud providers” as a database as a service (DBaaS). Learn the differences, the access methods and the level of control you have for the various public databases in the hosted cloud offerings:

• Amazon RDS including Aurora
• Google Cloud SQL
• Rackspace OpenStack DBaaS
• Oracle Cloud’s MySQL Service …

The slides and videos from the Percona Live Open Source Database Conference 2017 are available for viewing and download. The videos and slides cover the keynotes, breakout sessions and MySQL and MongoDB 101 sessions.

To view slides, go to the Percona Live agenda, and select the talk you want slides for from the schedule, and click through to the talk web page. The slides are available below the talk description. There is also a page with all the slides that is searchable by topic, talk title, speaker, company or keywords.

To view videos, go to the …

From everyone at Percona and Percona Live 2017, we’d like to send a big thank you to all our sponsors, exhibitors, and attendees at this year’s conference.

This year’s conference was an outstanding success! The event brought the open source database community together, with a technical emphasis on the core topics of MySQL, MariaDB, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, AWS, RocksDB, time series, monitoring and other open source database technologies.

We will be posting tutorial and session presentation slides at the Percona Live site, and all of them should be available shortly. 

Highlights This Year:

• Informative tutorials on day one, including …

Welcome to the first day of the Percona Live Open Source Database Conference: Percona Live 2017 tutorials day! While technically the first day of the conference, this day focused on provided hands-on tutorials for people interested in learning directly how to use open source tools and technologies.

Today attendees went to training sessions taught by open source database experts and got first-hand experience configuring, working with, and experimenting with various open source technologies and software.

The first full day (which includes opening keynote speakers and breakout sessions) starts Tuesday 4/25 at 9:00 am.

Some of the …