Percona University Istanbul 2022

Percona University is a series of database meetups that we organize worldwide in different locations. November 5th we came to Istanbul, economical, cultural and historical heart of Turkiye. HostedPMM and FerretDB supported us during this meetup and sponsored it.

It was a wonderful sunny day in Istanbul. We gathered together early in the morning at Kolektif House. It is an awesome coworking place with wonderful inhabitants and all the necessary equipment to hold an event.

People start coming early too to register and have some coffee. It was a great opportunity to connect with each other and network and also reserve a comfortable place in the room.

Totally, about 80 people showed up. The meetup was free and open to everyone.

Peter Zaitsev, Percona’s Founder, opened an event with a presentation The State of Open Source Databases and how Percona Contributes. He talked about how Percona sees problems in open source databases space and the solutions we provide.

After Peter, Alkin Tezuysal (ChistaDATA) and Sveta Smirnova (Percona) presented some recipes for developers from their MySQL Cookbook. They showed a few tasks with different priorities, such as JSON in MySQL for those who need flexibility, modern SQL for analytics, and Group Replication for high availability. They also showed how to write programs using JavaScript and Python languages, X DevAPI, and MySQL Shell, touched on some of the exciting features of MySQL spatial indexes and geographical data, using a full-text search, and more.

During a coffee break, all attendees had a chance to participate in a raffle of their amazing and useful book and book signing by Sveta and Alkin.

Roman Agabekov from Releem talked about whether tuning the MySQL configuration is important. He showed the results of testing the website response speed depending on MySQL configuration for popular web applications.

Attendees actively asked questions and participated in the discussions.

Cihan Tunali from SmartMessage talked about an easy way of application monitoring - Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM). Sergei Krupnik (HostedPMM) covered several PMM installation options (including HostedPMM), featured a high-level overview, and the real-life use case.

After that, everyone had a break for lunch, also provided by Percona and event sponsors. Attendees had an opportunity to chat with speakers and ask them questions, find each other on LinkedIn or do a selfie with a press wall.

Percona’s Ananias Tsalouchidis (Percona) demonstrated how to run MySQL on K8s and talked about its deployment, scaling, backups and advanced configuration.

Sergey Pronin’s theme was really exciting - Private DBaaS: Why you Need it, How to Build It. It was a quick tour into Percona Monitoring and Management Database-as-a-Service capability. using it, you can deploy and manage databases with UI, API or CLI on-prem and in the cloud, anywhere.

Nikolay Sivko (Coroot) talked about the chaos testing of a Postgres cluster on Kubernetes and how to make distributed applications, such as database clusters in Kubernetes, observable.

Alexey Palazhchenko, CTO at FerretDB, and Peter Farkas, CEO of FerretDB, shared their story of building an open source MongoDB-compatible database on top of PostgreSQL - FerretDB, an open-source proxy written in Go. It accepts connections and handles queries from unmodified MongoDB clients, and stores data in PostgreSQL. They explained the reasoning for starting this project, their vision, the current state of FerretDB, and our plans for the future.

Ibrar Ahmed told everyone all about PostgreSQL security. He covered all the available security techniques used in the latest PostgreSQL.

At the end of the event, Sveta Smirnova revealed the secrets of MySQL performance for devops. She showed minimal, but the most effective set of options that will improve MySQL performance based on real user stories, gained by her support experience, and Percona Kubernetes operators for PXC and MySQL.

Everyone had a chance to get a piece of Percona swag - a laptop bag, a pair of socks, nice pins and stickers.

The next day, speakers and event organizers went for a brunch sponsored by ChistaDATA Inc. It took place on a ship and included a nice trip in the waters near Istanbul.

Afterward, we walked around the city center and visited Basilica Cistern and other historical sites.

It was an unforgettable event and a breathtaking trip of Percona team to Istanbul. See you at other events!