Relational databases have existed for more than 40 years now. They’ve changed little over that period and while they work well, they couldn’t answer the scalability demands of cloud native apps that we find all around us. That’s where NoSQL stepped in to fill the scalability void. It’s gotten to a point where many perceive the advent of NoSQL databases have sounded the death knell for relational ones. 

Matt Yokovit, the Chief Experience Officer at Percona, that has both types of databases in its portfolio, isn’t about to write off relational databases just yet.… Read the full article

Back in 2010, YouTube was in a fix. The platform was growing fast and its infrastructure couldn’t match its pace. Pumping in more CPU and memory wasn’t helping; it was still falling apart at the seams. 

That’s when two YouTube engineers, Sugu Sougoumarane and Mike Soloman decided to take a step back and analyse the problem from a different perspective: “When we actually sat down and wrote a huge spreadsheet of all problems and solutions, and when we looked at all that, it was obvious that we needed to build something that sits between the application and the MySQL layer, and moderate all these queries,” says Sugu in a sit-down with TechRadar Pro on the sidelines of the Percona Live Conference Europe 2019 in Amsterdam. 

The solution to the problem came in the form of Vitess, which essentially makes it easy to scale and manage large clusters of MySQL databases.… Read the full article

Karen Ambrose is the database team lead at Francis Crick Institute in St. Pancras in London. We caught up with her at the Percona Live 2019 conference in Amsterdam to understand the complexities involved in managing databases in a scientific installation. Karen has been with the Francis Crick for about five years. She has a background in Bioinformatics and it was during her Masters that she got interested in the application of technology to get better insights into scientific data.

Karen started her career at the Sanger Institute in Cambridge at the time when they were mapping the Human Genome, before moving on to the Francis Crick Institute.… Read the full article

As the Chief Security Architect at Red Hat, Mike Bursell spends his days talking about security both inside and outside the company. His job, he tells us on the sidelines of the Open Source Summit Europe 2019 in Lyon, France, is to encourage people to think about security. Talking about the security challenges in today’s containerised world, Mike says that there’s more to containers than just the technology and people miss that it’s a cultural change: “It's very easy to forget that security isn't just about runtime.… Read the full article

Companies around the world prefer to have multiple databases in multiple locations over multiple platforms, according to a report unveiled at the Percona Live 2019 event in Amsterdam. Respondents from over 85 countries participated in the survey, many of whom offer cloud and SaaS solutions to startups, growing businesses, and established enterprises. 

While over half the respondents run up to 25 databases instances in production, some larger organisations even have over 10,000 instances.… Read the full article