The database frontier

Jay’s opening lines regarding the final MySQL Conference keynote speaker was: “I work with a lot of data. I think peta-bytes, maybe exa-bytes”. This was relating to Jacek Becla from the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, giving his presentation on “The Science and Fiction of Petascale Analytics”.

The goal of the Large Synoptics Survey Telescope (LSST) is the storage of 50+ PB of images and 20+ PB data.
Let’s just clarify the size. 20 PB of data = 20 years of HD Movies = 2000 years of 128kb MP3

The next database frontier is obviously building huge databases. What part will MySQL or other relational databases play? Some interesting facts were.

  • The Digital Universe Created 161 Exabytes of data last year.
  • Google, processes 20 petabytes of data per day.

The Operational plan for LSST Project Timeline is 10 years, only starting in 2014. The timeline:

  • 2009 Choosing Technology
  • 2010-2014 constructions
  • 2014-2023 production

The primary goals are: Scale, parallelize, fault tolerant.

Tagged with: Databases MySQL MySQL User Conferences MySQL Users Conference 2008

Why using production workloads over simulated workloads is critical

AI-Assisted SQL Tuning Last week in his keynote speech at Percona Live Bay Area 2026 , Andy Pavlo presented Databases: The Final Boss of Agents and provided some useful insights into query optimization of simulated workloads leveraging AI.

Improving your MySQL Security Posture Presentation

At the MySQL BR Conference 2025 I had the opportunity to speak about Improving Your MySQL Security Posture. You can find a copy of my slides on my Presentations , and a Portugese (Brazil) translation.

MySQL and Heatwave Summit Presentation

Last week I had the opportunity to speak at the MySQL and Heatwave Summit in San Francisco. I discussed the impact of the new MySQL 8.0 default caching_sha2_password authentication, replacing the mysql_native_password authentication that was the default for approximately 20 of the 30 years that MySQL has existed.