DrupalCon LA 2015 Video: Percona Interview

Last week’s DrupalCon interview featured the CMO of the Drupal Association, Joe Saylor. Saylor talked about what the Drupal Association does for Drupal and DrupalCon. If you missed the interview with the Drupal Association, Lullabot, Pantheon, or even our first Roundtable Interview, you can catch the interviews by clicking on the links. The interviews first appeared during our week long live broadcast with Periscope and Twitter.

In our latest video interview, we feature the Percona. Kyle Taylor, our Drupal Developer, caught up with Nikki and Liz and learned all about Percona and what they do with MySQL. 

Percona INTERVIEW

Note: The video is available in 1080p HD format.

WOULD YOU RATHER READ THE INTERVIEW? READ IT HERE:

[Kyle]: So this is Kyle with LevelTen Interactive and we're here interviewing with Percona and talking about MySQL, we are with Nikki and Liz and they're gonna tell us a little about Percona.

[Nikki]: Co-founded in 2006 by Vadim Tkachenko and Peter Zaitsev, we do support and services for mySQL, all versions of mySQL. We also do our own open source version of mySQL called Percona Server. We also just recently acquired Tokutek, so we also now do support and services for MongoDB, as well as TokuMX.

[Liz]: One important part to realize: If you're working with Drupal, 95% of cases you are running MySQL, so, MySQL is a very important part of your stack. If it goes down, your website is down, so we try to focus our services around hardening that and making sure it stays up and running.

[Kyle]: So it would be something comparing Percona with, like, MariaDB or like, you know, to mySQL in general, like, what is the advantage of Percona over those?

[Liz]: So we open source our own version of MySQL, it's called Percona Server, but that's just our contribution to the community. We support all versions of MySQL, including MariaDB. The difference between MariaDB and Percona server or MySQL is...

[Liz]: The different flavors, as we like to describe it. Percona Server likes to stay much closer to the original community edition of oracle. What we do is we take that code and we super charge it essentially. We add our own patches but we stay very closely feature compatible so every single version we can drop in and replace. MariaDB as we see it, goes a little further (Nikki chimes in: "goes a little further") on the cutting edge, they add more features where as we focus more on performance and stability, and just kind of enhancing features that are already there.

[Nikki]: Also noteworthy, a common misconception about Percona is that we support all versions of MySQL. So Percona server, we recommend it in some cases, if someone's having a performance issue that can be solved by Percona server but essentially we agnostic, we don't care what version of MySQL you're running as long as we can help you, we're happy to help you.

[Liz]: Yeah.

[Kyle]: Ok, so if we...So if I'm ya know...There's obviously a lot of Drupal hosting companies here, Acquia, Pantheon, BlackMesh, who ever, roaching around in the corner. So who do you guys partner with in terms of ya know? Is it something that we have to do ourselves, do you work with hosting companies who get Percona set up separately or are you a database server company?

[Nikki]: We'll provide support and services for any instance of MySQL anywhere so if a hosting provider is hosting your MySQL servers we can help you via the hosting provider we also provide services on AWS, it doesn't matter to us where your servers are we can help you there.

[Kyle]: So you're everywhere?

[Liz]: Pretty much.

[Nikki]: We're everywhere. We don't really partner specifically with any hosting providers, some hosting providers come to us so that they can better support their customers through their MySQL installation.

[Kyle]: So where can we learn more about Percona?

[Nikki]: www.percona.com

[Kyle]: Ok, that's it?

[Liz]: That's it.

[Nikki]: Or you can go to MySQL performance blog, its a very old very informative blog a lot of great content if you're not looking to purchase anything or necessarily give us a call you can find a lot of great information there for free. It's 100% Percona content.

[Kyle]: Awesome. Thank you so much. Anything else?

[Nikki]: No.

[Kyle]: Ok, Thanks.

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