Booking.com, one of the world’s leading e-commerce companies, helps travels book nearly 1 million rooms per night. Established in 1996, Booking.com B.V. guarantees the best prices for any type of property, from small, family-run bed and breakfasts to executive apartments and five-star luxury suites.
The travel website is also a dedicated contributor to the MySQL and Perl community. Other open source technologies include CentOS Linux, Nginx, python, puppet, Git and more.
A Diamond sponsor of Percona Live Amsterdam Sept. 21-23, you can meet the people who power Booking.com at booth 205. Enter promo code “BlogInterview” at registration to save €20!
In the meantime, meet Jean-François Gagné, a system engineer at Booking.com. He’ll be presenting a couple of talks: “Riding the Binlog: an in Deep Dissection of the Replication Stream” and “Binlog Servers at Booking.com.”
Tom: Hi Jean-François, in your session, “Riding the Binlog: an in Deep Dissection of the Replication Stream“, you talk about how we can think of the binary logs as a transport for a “Stream of Transactions”. What will be the top 3 things attendees will come away with following this 50-minute talk?
Jean-François: Hi Tom, thanks for this opportunity to give a sneak peak of my talk. The most important subject that will be discussed is that the binary logs evolves: by the usage of “log-slave-updates”, the stream can grow, shrink or morph. Said in another way: the binary logs of a slave can be very different from the binary logs of the master, and this should be taken into account when relying on those (including when replicating using intermediate master and when promoting a slave as a new master using GTIDs). We will also explore how the binary logs can be decomposed in sub-streams, or viewed as the multiplexing of many streams. We will also look for de-multiplexing functions and the new possibilities that are opened with that.
Tom: Percona Live, starting with this conference, has a new venue and a broader theme – now encompassing, in addition to MySQL, MongoDB, NoSQL and data in the cloud. Your thoughts? And what do think is missing – what would you change (if anything)?
Jean-François: I think you forget the best of all changes: going from a 2 day conference last year in London to a 3 day conference this year. This will allow better knowledge exchange and I am very happy about that. I think this event will be a success with a good balance of sessions focus on technologies and presentation about a specific use-case of those technologies. If I had one wish: I would like to see more sessions about specific use-cases of NoSQL technologies with and in deep discussion about why they are a better choice than more traditional solutions: maybe more of those sessions will be submitted next year.
Tom: Which other session(s) are you most looking forward to besides your own?
Jean-François: I will definitely attend the Facebook session about Semi-Synchronous Replication: it is very close to my interest, especially as Booking.com is thinking about using loss-less semi-sync replication in the future, and I look forward to hear war stories about this feature. All sessions dissecting internals of a technology (InnoDB, TokuDB, RocksDB, …) will also have my attention. Finally, it is always interesting to hear about how large companies are using databases, so I plan to attend the MySQL@Wikimedia session.
Tom: As a resident of Amsterdam, what are some of the must-do activities/sightseeing for those visiting for Percona Live from out of town?
Jean-François: Seeing the city from a high point is impressive, and you will have the opportunity of enjoying that view from the Booking.com office at the Community Dinner. Also, I recommend finding a bike and discover the city pedaling (there are many renting shops, just ask Google). From the conference venue, you can do a 70 minutes ride crossing three nice parks: the Westerpark, the Rembrandtpark and the Vondelpark – https://goo.gl/P13Mc7 – and you can discover the first of third park in a shorter ride (45 minutes). If you feel a little more adventurous, I recommend a 90 minute ride South following the Amstel: once out of Amsterdam, you will have the water on one side at the level of the road, and the fields (Polder) 3 meters below on the other side (https://goo.gl/OPDv5z). This will allow you to see for yourself why this place is called the “Low Countries”.
