March, 15, 2024 archives

The second day of the Southern California Linux Expo meant the start of the expo, and the more talks.

I started the day with “Best Practices for Running Databases on Kubernetes” with Peter Zaitsev, who was a coworker at MySQL and went on to found Percona. While I am getting a better sense of what Kubernetes is all about and already had some idea of how databases might exist in that world, his talk was a great overview and the “best practices” seemed to cover a lot of bases.

That was followed by “Kubernetes and Distributed SQL Databases: Same Consistency With Better Availability and Scalability” which showed off using Kine as a way to plug in different systems as the data store for Kubernetes instead of etcd. I wish the speaker had spent a little more time giving some practical examples of why is something you would even want to do. It was a good reminder that k3s exists and I should play around with it. And the speaker just using an outline in an open text editor (Pico!) as his slides reminded me of when I gave a talk on MySQL and PHP using plain-text slides. (Looks like my talk has been disappeared, though.)

After that, it was back over to the other side of the expo for a talk on “Leveraging PrestoDB for data success” which was an overview of the Presto project, which provides an ANSI SQL query interface to a collection of other data sources (my paraphrase). Kiersten Stokes, the presenter who works at IBM, called MySQL a “traditional database” which struck me as funny. Presto is a very slick and powerful system that I will probably never need. I appreciate that everyone I have seen talk about the concept of a “data lakehouse” is appropriately embarrassed about the name.

Before the next round of talks started, the expo floor finally opened, so I took a quick spin through that. It was pretty busy, and seemed like a good crowd of projects and companies. I think the largest footprint was maybe a couple of 10' × 40' booths from companies like AWS and Meta, but otherwise it was a lot of 10' × 10' booths with a couple of people handing out stickers or other promotional items from behind a table (and talking about their projects/companies).

After that I went back to the MySQL track (four talks!) to see “Design and Modeling for MySQL” which was really more of a speed-run of database history and concepts. The presenter made the classic mistake of white text on a dark background so it was pretty tough to see what he was showing until someone dimmed the lights.

That was followed by “Beyond MySQL: Advancing into the New Era of Distributed SQL with TiDB” from Sunny Bains, whose time as the MySQL/InnoDB team overlapped my time working at MySQL, but I don’t think we ever met. TiDB seems like a very impressive cloud-native distributed database which doesn’t actually derive from MySQL, but instead has chosen to be protocol and query-language compatible.

The last session I attended was a panel from the Open Government track on “The OSPO POV.” OSPO stands for “Open Source Program Office” and can act as kind of the interface between companies or organizations and the open source world. There were a bunch of projects and communities mentioned that I want to look into further: TODO Group, Fintech Open Source Foundation, CHAOSS (Community Health Analytics in Open Source Software), Sustain, The Open Source Way, Inner Source Commons, and OSPO++.

Things got busier today, which was nice to see. I wasn’t in a great headspace most of the day, which pretty much sucked, but I think I came away with a lot of things to dig into on my own, which is one of the reasons I wanted to attend.