is one of the main events on the DBMS world calendar. Once it all started with the development of one of the forks of MySQL, but then it greatly outgrew the progenitor. And although a lot of materials (and visitors) are still closely related to MySQL, the general information background has become much wider: MongoDB, PostgreSQL, and other less popular DBMS. This year, Perkona has become a significant event on our calendar: for the first time we took part in this American conference. As you probably already know . With the shift of infrastructure paradigms towards maximum flexibility, microservices and cluster solutions, the accompanying tools and support approaches should also change. That, in fact, was my report. But first, I want to tell you how they get to the US conferences in general and what surprises can await immediately after the plane lands.
So, how do people get to foreign conferences? In fact, this process is not so complicated: you need to contact the program committee, declare your topic for the report, attach evidence that you already have experience speaking at technical events. Naturally, given the geography of the conference, language proficiency is an important point. Highly desirable, including the experience of speaking in front of an English-speaking audience. All these issues are discussed with the program committee, they evaluate your potential, and either - or.
Legal issues, of course, have to be resolved independently. By virtue of what reasons you understand, the execution of visa documents in Russia is somewhat difficult. For example, in Moscow, the waiting time for a Visitor Visa is 300 days at the time of writing. Residents of the capitals, in general, are used to circumventing these difficulties by processing documents in some neighboring states. But since we are based in Irkutsk, the nearest neighboring state to us is Mongolia ... Stop. Ulaanbaatar! After all, there is also an American embassy there. And, frankly, not very popular and therefore not very busy. The journey from Irkutsk to Ulaanbaatar by plane takes one hour. The time zone does not change - you can continue to work in a comfortable and familiar rhythm. It takes just half an hour from entering the embassy to obtaining a visa. The only difficulty is that you can pay the consular fee only in cash tugriks at a branch of Khaan Bank. Therefore, if you want to come immediately for a ready visa, then it would be nice to have someone you know there who can help with the solution of this issue.
So. The visa was received, the seat on the plane was saddled. The entry into the States themselves is approaching. Crossing the border there has always been a very tedious business. When I first arrived in 2010, I was blown away by how long passport control took in Washington. No, of course, the queue to the cherished windows has always been a classic. But for some decent time (several years, for sure), special machines have been added that break through your information and give you a piece of paper with your photo - and everything has become faster. All the last trips I flew with a round-trip ticket, with all the data on accommodation entered into the ticket, etc. And this time I flew with a ticket there with a rescheduled date and without a return ticket associated with it. And voila: the photograph on the white paper was crossed out.
Officer approach
The line was suddenly just as long as it had been a few years ago, and when I finally got to passport control an hour later, I arrived completely relaxed. The officer asked why I had come; I answered - business (sales, visa type b1 / b2 allows this) and rest (vacation), to which he clarified which flight I arrived on, and explained that I was not in the database of those who flew. I really wanted to sleep and replied that I didnβt know why that wasβ¦ maybe because I had changed the departure dates. An American official asked why I changed my departure dates and when I was flying back. To which I replied that I had changed because I decided to fly at a different time, and when I fly back, I can only give an approximate answer. And then the officer said βokayβ, raised his hand and called another guy, to whom he gave my passport. He took me to an additional check. To my reminder that I had a plane in an hour, he calmly replied, βDonβt worry, you were definitely late for it, it will take several hours, you will be given paper to transfer tickets.β
Oh-kay. I went into the room: there are another 40 people sitting there, there were 3 people from our flight, including me. I sat down, just got into the phone, the guard immediately ran up and said to turn it off, and pointed to the walls: it turned out that everything around was in signs βyou canβt use phonesβ, which I didnβt notice from fatigue and lack of sleep. I turned it off, but the neighbor did not have time - those who do not have time simply take away their phones. It took about three hours, from time to time someone was called for extra. interview, in the end they didnβt call me anywhere - they just issued a passport with a stamp that they let me in. What was it? (c) True, the ticket for the missed flight, in the end, was indeed changed according to the certificate received.
City of Austin, Texas
And now, finally, Texas land under my feet. Texas - although a toponym familiar to a Russian person, is still not the most visited place by compatriots. I've traveled to California and New York for work before, but never had to travel that far south. And if not for Percona Live, it is still unknown when it would have to.
The city of Austin is something like a "California enclave" within the state of Texas. How did it happen? The initial basis for the rapid growth of the Valley, in addition to, of course, government investments, was the mild climate and the low cost of living and doing business. But now that San Francisco and the surrounding area have literally become a symbol of exorbitant cost, new startups are looking for new places. And Texas turned out to be a good option. First, zero income tax. Secondly, zero tax on gross profit for individual entrepreneurs. A large number of universities - therefore, a developed market for skilled labor. Not very high, by American standards, the cost of living. All this in general gives a good boost to the development of new technological enterprises. And - creates an audience for relevant events.
Percona Live itself took place at the Hyatt Regency. According to the currently popular scheme, the conference consisted of several parallel thematic streams: two on MySQL, one each on Mongo and PostgreSQL, as well as sections on AI, security and business. Unfortunately, it was not possible to fully evaluate the entire program, due to the tight regime of preparation for one's own performance. But those reports that I had a chance to look at were extremely entertaining. Separately, I would single out "The Changing Landscape of Open Source Databases" by Petr Zaitsev and "Too Much Data?" by Yves Trudeau. We met with Alexei Milovidov there - he was also with a report and brought with him a whole team from Clickhouse, which I also touched upon in my speech.
Allow me to report
And, actually, about the main thing: what did I talk about? The report was devoted to how we chose the new version of the time-series database monitoring system for ourselves. It somehow happened in our Palestinians that when the need arises for this kind of tool, it is customary to take Clickhouse by default. Why? "Because he's faster." And really faster? How much? Maybe there are some other pros and cons that we don't think about until we try something else? We decided to take a hardcore approach to the study of problems; but just taking and listing the characteristics is boring and, frankly, not very memorable. And to people, as the beautiful teaches Roman Poborchy, it's much more interesting to hear a story. Therefore, we talked about how we drove all the tested DBMS on our production data, which we receive in real time every second from our monitoring agents.
What are your impressions of the event?
Everything was well organized, the presentations were interesting. But what stood out the most was where DBMS were heading technologically. Many people, for example, have not used self-hosted solutions for a long time. We are not very used to this yet and, accordingly, we do not see anything unusual in our own installation, configuration and support of the DBMS. And there, clouds have long enslaved everyone, and conditional RDS is the default option. Why worry about performance, security, backups, keep separate technical specialists for this, if you can take a ready-made service where everything is already thought out for you in advance?
This is a very interesting and, perhaps, a wake-up call for those who are not yet ready to provide their solutions in such a format.
And in general, this applies not only to the DBMS, but to the entire server infrastructure. Administration is shifting from the Linux console to the web console, where you need to be able to choose the right services and cross them with each other, understand how specific cloud providers work with their EKS, ECS, GKE and other capital letters. In our country, in connection with the beloved law on personal data, domestic players in the hosting market have developed well, but so far we are somewhat behind the leading edge of the global technological movement, and we have yet to experience such paradigm shifts for ourselves.
And I will definitely publish a detailed analysis of the report, but a little later: now it is being prepared - I am translating from English into Russian π
Source: habr.com