Last week, we had two exceptional preFOSDEM MySQL Days in Brussels. A lot of MySQL Engineers presented their work but also different MySQL Users. I will publish soon an overview of the two days, but today let me share with you an interview I did with Giedrius Jaraminas, engineering manager of MySQL team in Uber.
“MySQL is heart of the Uber infrastructure“, this is how Giedrius started his presentation “Group Replication in Uber“.
The interview:
Q1: Tell us about yourself, and your experience with MySQL
A1: I am a database guy for 28 years, but I am relatively new to MySQL – I am a manager of MySQL team for only 3.5 years.
Q2: Tell us about your company, and how MySQL is used.
A2: MySQL is the main offer as a relational database, also – it is used as the backend for our home-build scalable KV store. It is critical for an infrastructure. Basically – every time you are using Uber – somewhere MySQL databases are working.
Q3: What is the particular application/system you presented about at the preFOSDEM MySQL Day?
A3: I was sharing our real-life experience of onboarding Multi-Primary Group-Replication – the decisions to be made while starting to use it.
Q4: In your presentation, you talked of course about MySQL Group Replication, you are running it in Multi-Primary mode.
A4: Having Multi-Primary solves the fundamental problem of MySQL – having single point of failure while leaving the system as close to ACID as it is expected from MySQL clusters.
Q5: Do you have plans to Move to MySQL 8 ? What are the key features that attract you ?
A5: The Group Replication part is already on MySQL 8. There are some clusters in the regular fleet as well, but the migration still awaits (maybe late 2020). Our users are definitely into improved JSON and GIS functionality, recursive queries. And our team would be sleeping better with transactional data dictionary.
Q6: What do you think about MySQL InnoDB Clone ?
A6: It is always good to have additional tools. Of course, we need to migrate to MySLQ 8 until we could consider it.
Thank you again Giedrius and Uber for having shared your use of MySQL Group Replication.
