Alibaba vs. Facebook is where the West converges with the East

Of course, we could not help but take advantage of the turn by the leadership of the country to the East. Does China have its own social networks, its own search engines, its own postal services, and maybe even its own technologies?

There are many countries in the world that sell the work of their programmers, but very few are able to independently develop major serious software products. Only three countries in the world have their own search engines, their social networks and their antivirus - these are the USA, Russia and ... China!
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Moreover, if we use information products and technologies made in the USA every day, then there is little information in China.



If we take Russia, then we have our own development, widely used all over the world: nginx web server, Sphinx search engine, Tarantool NoSQL database, Flussonic video server. By the way, all these developments have a booth at HighLoad ++ for free , at these booths conference participants will be able to get advice. Toaster users can appreciate the opportunity to communicate with experts using special tags for NoSQL , PostgreSQL , Erlang and in general for HighLoad .

It is possible that the same world exists in China! And at HighLoad ++ we will find out about this - Lin Xiaobin, a reporter from China, from the largest company Alibaba, comes to us. By the way, you do not have a familiar translator from Chinese?

Lin Xiaobin will tell you about using MySQL database in China’s largest project! Yes, yes, a large project does not mean non-standard tools.

What the report confirms from another part of the world - Alexey Maykov will tell about MyRocks - this is a new storage engine based on RocksDB. As it turned out, the main data repository on Facebook is based on the MySQL database, which runs on thousands of servers in different data centers.

The MySQL theme, of course, was thoroughly analyzed at previous conferences. Here are some of the most interesting reports:





The drama of the choice of the best reports comes to an end - the report “Press and Conquer: Compression Algorithms in Databases” accurately passed into the program. By the way, this is a report by Peter Zaitsev, the head of Percona, the world's largest consultant for MySQL, which publishes its own fork of this database, and the organizer of the international conference on the performance of Percona Live databases.



Well, according to the established tradition, and taking this opportunity, we asked Peter several tricky questions:

- The place of MySQL in the modern world?

MySQL is a stable technology that is used by many companies in the Internet as well as in more traditional businesses. After MySQL has become one of the Oracle technologies, we see that many large companies from different business areas are ready to trust it in business-critical applications. MySQL is well supported by various programming languages, hosting providers; Many system administrators and developers are well acquainted with it, which means that it is very easy to find people who can work with it, which also reduces the risks of using it to create applications.

On the other hand, MySQL has some problems: the fact that MySQL is an Oracle technology gives it a reputation of not quite an OpenSource project, and despite the fact that Oracle invests enormous engineering resources in the development of MySQL, some people think about the future of this project, especially its open source version.

The maturity and popularity of MySQL technology also led to the fact that many solutions that are based on MySQL appeared on the market: MariaDB, Percona Server, Percona XtraDB Cluster, as well as Amazon RDS, Aurora, Google CloudSQL - Cloud solutions based on MySQL.

The fact that MySQL is a fairly stable and reliable technology also makes it less interesting for the new generation of administrators and developers who are interested in new approaches and solutions, which means that among new companies not a large percentage choose MySQL as, for example, 10 years ago . On the other hand, we see much more companies that do not completely abandon MySQL, but use several technologies at once - for example, MySQL + MongoDB + Hadoop, focusing on the advantages each technology has.

On the technological side, I see the main problem of MySQL in that, unlike many new technologies, scaling in the cloud and parallel data processing should be done manually. If you do this, then it works well, as the experience of Facebook, Twitter, and many other major MySQL users shows. New technologies, however, often allow you to do this much more simply and automatically - for example, Cassandra, Hadoop, MongoDB.

- MySQL successes in the Russian market?

MySQL has many users in the Russian market, especially among Internet companies, both the largest and the smaller ones. Interestingly, in Russia, PostgreSQL’s position relative to MySQL is much stronger than in many other countries of the world, as can be seen from this conference.

- Why exactly this topic of the report and what will be interesting?

I will talk about compression in databases in general and in MySQL in particular. This topic is very relevant now, since, on the one hand, with the development of cloud technologies and flash drives, we are once again interested in the size of the database, and on the other hand, fast processors with multiple cores can improve performance using compression, or at least , slightly reduce it.

- What will happen to MySQL in the foreseeable future?

We are expecting MySQL 5.7 very soon. Oracle doesn’t talk about exact plans, but it’s most likely that it is announced on Oracle Open World before Highload ++ is a very interesting release, where there are many improvements for developers and database administrators to more conveniently administer the system and get more performance.

MySQL Group Replication is a competing technology to our Percona XtraDB Cluster and Galera technologies, which is currently in the testing phase. When it is released, I think it will push innovation in synchronous replication for MySQL.

The development of technology for Sharding is also very interesting - here are interesting as well as MySQL Fabric and MySQL Router, solutions from Oracle, as well as ProxySQL, MaxScale, ScaleArc, solutions from other companies.

I believe that the development of MySQL is going in the right direction - MySQL does not try to be Hadoop, Cassandra, Sphinx or even PostgreSQL, but develops to be the best MySQL. In this, I believe, the strength of OpenSource technologies, that different projects and companies manage to create solutions that have their strengths.

- Anything else?

We at Percona are interested in this area, since starting this year we have expanded the range of our solutions, which now include not only MySQL, but MongoDB as well.

It should be said about two interesting trends. One is technological, the other is business. From the point of view of technology, the industry has matured the understanding that there are several approaches to the data model, processing consistency, and therefore we see that many companies use several technologies together for the purposes for which they are most good. This approach allows you to get the highest performance and use the maximum capacity on the one hand, but on the other hand, it is rather expensive and difficult to maintain a multitude of technologies.

In this regard, we see the development of multi-modal databases that allow the use of several data models in one database - for example, relational data + documented storage + graphs. This approach is more limited in terms of performance and feature set, but allows the use of fewer different technologies. For example, in MySQL 5.7 added support for the JSON type, which allows you to create effective solutions for storing documents.

Business trend - we see that more and more companies believe in the maturity of OpenSource technologies - MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, etc. and actively look at the transfer of existing applications to these technologies, or even more often to the use of these technologies to create new applications and systems (or new versions of old applications).

On the part of Percona, we help many companies make sensible decisions and carry out this migration in the most efficient way. This trend means that more and more resources will be invested in the OpenSource database, and their quality, performance and capabilities will continue to grow, closing the gap (where it still is) with commercial databases.

The report “TokuDB internals” from Vladislav Lesin will reveal the internal structure of the new storage engine for MySQL. How does a developer of highly loaded solutions differ from a simple programmer? The second one simply assembles a finished project from the cubes, and the first one understands how the cubes work and, based on this knowledge, can assemble the most efficient and productive solution.

And finally : For the users of Habrakhabr, the conference offers a special discount of 15%, all you need to do is use the code " IAmHabr " when booking tickets.