In a previous post, my colleague Dimitri Vanoverbeke discussed at a high level the concepts of database as a service (DBaaS), OpenStack and OpenStack’s implementation of a DBaaS, Trove. Today I’d like to delve a bit further into Trove and discuss where it fits in, and who benefits.

Just to recap, Trove is OpenStack’s implementation of a database as a service for its cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS). And as the mission statement declares, the Trove project seeks to provide a scalable and reliable cloud database service providing functionality for both relational and non-relational database engines. With the current release of Icehouse, the technology has begun to show maturity providing both stability and a rich feature set.

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MySQL plays a critical role in OpenStack. It serves as the host database supporting most components such as Nova, Glance, and Keystone and is the most mature guest database in Trove. Many OpenStack operators use Percona open source software including the MySQL drop-in compatible Percona Server and Galera-based Percona XtraDB Cluster as well as tools such as Percona XtraBackup and Percona Toolkit. We see a need in the community to understand how to improve MySQL performance …

Some of us Perconians are at OpenStack summit this week in Atlanta. Matt Griffin, our director of product management, tweeted about the turbo-hipster CI talk about their experience of ALTER TABLEs running faster on Percona Server. Oracle’s Morgan Tocker then tweeted in response, asking why this was the case. I decided that the simplest way to answer that was here in this post.

The reason for this is the …