As we told you in a previous article, Innobyte attended the Percona Live Conference in London, represented by two of our web developer colleagues. They just returned and right away we talked to them in order to find out first hand what this conference was all about.
Ana: One of Percona Live’s subjects was about the challenges that appear when using MySQL and the best solutions for solving the problems. Did you get answers or solutions for the problems you deal with?
Florin: The conference was mainly about database problems of web sites that have a lot of products or users, such as online shops. The discussions were about ways of overcoming these problems, how to improve the responding time with the help of cache solutions, what to do in order to obtain a better u-time for your web site when there is a problem with your server.
Ana: The list of people who were supposed to hold a speech at the conference was long and impressive. Which speech did you find to be most interesting and helpful?
Cristi: It’s hard to say. Alexey Rybak, Badoo representative held a speech for about 7 hours, showing tutorials as well, then there were Percona representatives with their partners who presented solutions for databases and systems that require a lot of traffic, solutions for when you have much data, which make a programmer’s life easier. Domas Mituzas, Facebook database engineer covered another field, regarding scalability in MySQL. Really interesting was Giuseppe Maxia’s speech. He presented the way a database and multi-master replication solution was created, being able to use at the same time Oracle, Postgres and MySQL.
Ana: What is the most valuable thing you gained by participating at Percona Live Conference?
Florin: We learned a lot of things, form how to conceive an architecture to the steps that need to be followed, how to research the market, how to choose the tools you need in order to build a web-site to how to avoid the problems in case a server goes down and you need backup.
Ana: By participating to this event, do you feel your performances as web developers will be improved?
Cristi: Yes! First of all we’ll know how to create a better design of the app itself; if we had certain questions about certain aspects, whether they should or should not be used, now we have a better idea. You see tutorials, you read on the internet, but until you talk to people that actually face these problems, that have 130 million users and 1 million active users, that can tell you how to test the code, you can’t truly understand some aspects. The experience of the people form this event was truly helpful!