MySQL Other Advice

Patryk Golabek

CTO at Translucent Computing Inc

The biggest lesson I would tell others is regarding the backups. Once you start doing it yourself, backing up becomes a thing. When we sign up the clients, we'll give them a set amount of backups daily and we always give them a little verbiage about how much data can be lost if the thing goes down.

Or for example, if you get hit somewhere, what is the last backup you did? How much are you willing to lose? Backups can become quite complicated, and that's something that you have to manage yourself. We have to come up with clever solutions to do runs within our Dockerized environments in production, which you usually don't get from the community. So we have to do it ourselves.

That became a thing quickly once we started going. But that was years ago. We resolved these issues on the way and we are still making them better over time - how we back up the data, the business, the compliance, where did the issue live, who should have access to that? All that stuff.

So backups are usually the thing that people don't think about. And that can bite you in the ass kind of quickly.

On a scale of one to ten, I'd probably give MySQL a seven. There's definitely room for improvement here in terms of tools that come with the product, the way we deploy it, and the way we back it up. In essence, it's a good beginner base. It's just, the tooling around the database needs a little bit more work. You just need to be fair because it is a good database. It's also an open-source database. You know you can get commercial products that Percona for a commercial version of MySQL or Aurora database MySQL. So if you go with that, then you would probably give a much higher score because you really don't see it at all. It's just close your eyes and click a button and it's there. You don't have to touch it at all.

For us, since we deal with it every day and try to compete with the companies, the small DevOps team tries to be as efficient as they can, and sometimes you have to build too many things around the solution.

The commercial products only have that because they put 20 to 30 people on JSON and they can give it to you faster. That's what Google can do because they're good at the tooling around the database. In the current requests of the work, MySQL Workbench is the default tool to interact with the database. Again, MySQL Workbench is an open-source tool that it gets directly from Oracle. It's okay. It's not the greatest. It gets the job done. It's not a finesse tool. It just gets the job done.

If you hide it behind a main service and you don't see it, it's great. You're good to go. People talk about Amazon RDS and how great it is. But that's a managed product. If you peel the layers and look at the SQL in there, they put a lot of work around that. It's fully scalable. The money used and the way they restructured that SQL database to actually give you that performance took a lot of work for the AWS people. So they're not going to share that IP with you. And they're definitely not going to release it because other people can pick it up, like Google. Then Google has Cloud SQL, as well. So they also have a MySQL version in there and they don't show you how the backup is, or how they actually manage it or scale it. You don't get that information.

So that's the trade-off between managed and non-managed or self-hosting. It's always that kind of battle, that fight. It depends on the money, depends on the client. If it's for a healthcare issue or one of the hospitals, you just have to decide what they want, what's the best for them and how they're going to be protected. So there are many variables that come into play. It depends on your use case. In general, it’s a good database, I have no problem with it.

MySQL Reviews

MySQL Other Advice