{"id":4448,"date":"2017-09-06T00:49:18","date_gmt":"2017-09-06T00:49:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.odbms.org\/blog\/?p=4448"},"modified":"2017-09-06T17:49:37","modified_gmt":"2017-09-06T17:49:37","slug":"on-open-source-databases-interview-with-peter-zaitsev","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.odbms.org\/blog\/2017\/09\/on-open-source-databases-interview-with-peter-zaitsev\/","title":{"rendered":"On Open Source Databases. Interview with Peter Zaitsev"},"content":{"rendered":"

“To be competitive with non-open-source cloud deployment options, open source databases need to invest in \u201cease-of-use.\u201d There is no tolerance for complexity in many development teams as we move to \u201cops-less\u201d deployment models.” –Peter Zaitsev<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I have interviewed Peter Zaitsev<\/strong>, Co-Founder and CEO of Percona<\/strong>.<\/a> <\/em>
\nIn this interview, Peter talks about the Open Source Databases market; the Cloud; the scalability challenges at Facebook; compares MySQL, MariaDB, and MongoDB; and presents Percona\u2019s contribution to the MySQL and MongoDB ecosystems.<\/p>\n

RVZ<\/em><\/p>\n

Q1. What are the main technical challenges in obtaining application scaling?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Peter Zaitsev<\/strong>: When it comes to scaling, there are different types. There is a Facebook\/Google\/Alibaba\/Amazon scale: these giants are pushing boundaries, and usually are solving very complicated engineering problems at a scale where solutions aren\u2019t easy or known. This often means finding edge cases that break things like hardware, operating system kernels and the database. As such, these companies not only need to build a very large-scale infrastructures, with a high level of automation, but also ensure it is robust enough to handle these kinds of issues with limited user impact. A great deal of hardware and software deployment practices must to be in place for such installations.<\/p>\n

While these \u201cextreme-scale\u201d applications are very interesting and get a lot of publicity at tech events and in tech publications, this is a very small portion of all the scenarios out there. The vast majority of applications are running at the medium to high scale, where implementing best practices gets you the scalability you need.<\/p>\n

When it comes to MySQL<\/a>, perhaps the most important question is when you need to \u201cshard.\u201d Sharding<\/a> — while used by every application at extreme scale — isn\u2019t a simple \u201cout-of-the-box\u201d feature in MySQL. It often requires a lot of engineering effort to correctly implement it.<\/p>\n

While sharding is sometimes required, you should really examine whether it is necessary for your application. A single MySQL instance can easily handle hundreds of thousands per second (or more) of moderately complicated queries, and Terabytes of data. Pair that with MemcacheD<\/a> or Redis caching<\/a>, MySQL Replication<\/a> or more advanced solutions such as Percona XtraDB Cluster<\/a> or Amazon Aurora<\/a>, and you can cover the transactional (operational) database needs for applications of a very significant scale.<\/p>\n

Besides making such high-level architecture choices, you of course need to also ensure that you exercise basic database hygiene. Ensure that you\u2019re using the correct hardware (or cloud instance type), the right MySQL and operating system version and configuration, have a well-designed schema and good indexes. You also want to ensure good capacity planning, so that when you want to take your system to the next scale and begin to thoroughly look at it you\u2019re not caught by surprise.<\/p>\n

Q2. Why did Facebook create MyRocks<\/a>, a new flash-optimized transactional storage engine on top of RocksDB <\/a>storage engine for MySQL?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Peter Zaitsev<\/strong>: The Facebook Team is the most qualified to answer this question. However, I imagine that at Facebook scale being efficient is very important because it helps to drive the costs down. If your hot data is in the cache when it is important, your database is efficient at handling writes — thus you want a \u201cwrite-optimized engine.\u201d
\nIf you use Flash storage<\/a>, you also care about two things:<\/p>\n