>> Learn about driverless cars, and Azure Database for
MySQL Flexible Server have in common this week on Data Exposed.
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>> Hi I'm Anna Hoffman, and
welcome to this episode of Data Exposed.
Today I'm joined by Parik a member of
the Azure Database for MySQL team.
Thanks so much for joining us today.
>> Thanks, Anna. Thanks for having me here.
>> It's a pleasure to have you on
the show, and before we get into it,
can you tell us a little bit about what you do?
>> Sure. My name is Parikshit Savjani, or my friends call me Parik.
I lead the Product Management Team for MySQL,
and MariaDB service in Azure.
I've been around for more than 20 years in
Microsoft, and most of
my experience comes from working with relational databases.
>> Awesome. Cool well,
it seems like you're a great person to have on the show
because we're going to be talking about the GA,
or general availability that was recently announced for
Azure Database for MySQL Flexible Server.
I wanted to kick us off by just asking you,
what makes MySQL Flexible Server so unique?
>> That's a great question, and to answer that question,
let me ask you a question to draw
some boundary in terms of user experience.
>> Okay.
>> You live in California, right?
>> Yes.
>> What do you think about driverless cars,
benefits of driverless car to you?
>> I mean driverless car seems pretty awesome.
Maybe I'm a little nervous, but overall sounds like
a great thing like I don't have to worry about driving or,
getting gas, or anything like that.
>> That's awesome Anna. The benefits of
the driverless car is very clear to you.
But let's say if you decide to ride a driverless car,
and you hinted a bit of nervousness too,
and you can imagine the nervousness comes from,
hey do I get to control the max, and
min speeds of the car when it's riding on the highway?
Do I get to control how much distance my car will maintain,
for the car ahead of me, and at what point it will start to break?
Your preference might be different than my preference.
These are some of the controls which you as
a user as you transition into, or from
a full control of the car into a driverless car you would
want or you would expect to calm down that nervousness.
What our learning's work that our
customers who are running MySQL engine,
on their on-premises environment, or even on
Vms they're so used to that control, and when
they transition into paths they all enjoy it, and
love the benefits of paths either
provisioning HE backup is taken care monitoring,
but they don't wish to lose control with some of the activities
and would like to set some of the preferences and configuration,
and that's the essence of
Flexible Server design, and you would see that in the experience.
In fact, let's do this,
let me demonstrate the experience to you, and hopefully,
then you could see it to believe it.
>> Awesome. Yeah, let's see your work.
>> Let's get started. Once you have provisioned
your Flexible Server this is the screen
where you could set yourself parameter configuration.
This is the configuration which
normally the users, the developers,
or the DBAs would set in my.com file in MySQL engine.
Now the file is not exposed in
a past service, but you could still set these parameters.
For example, if you decide to turn off
SSL although we don't recommend it,
but let's say you have a legacy application,
and you just have to do
it because you don't have bandwidth to refactor
applications, and you are running in a VNet environment you
feel reasonably good about the network isolation,
and you're okay to turn off SSL.
You just have to search for that parameter,
and here you would turn
those settings off, and save the configuration.
We have around 300 plus sole parameters
exposed with MySQL Flexible Server here yet,
if you can see here we've paginated them,
you could browse through them, or sorts
them real quickly to optimize
the MySQL engine based on your preferences, and save them.
Now, this has configuration.
Now let's say your server application is up, and
running, and now you're ready to get into production mode,
the next thing when you get into production mode is,
you want to configure the maintenance time.
What is the time window at which you
want the service to patch your MySQL Server,
and you have full control over defining your maintenance window.
You can define the day of the week,
and your one-hour time window at which
you want the start your server to be patched and
save those configuration as well so that you have full control on
your maintenance window to ensure you maximize
the uptime for your business, and minimize the downtime.
Now, maintenance is done.
Now, also you want to see hey,
backup, and restore although it's taken care of by the service,
I want visibility into my backups.
I want to see the backups are
happening on my server it's just a piece of mind
thing even though the pass
service guarantees that, but I want to see it to believe it.
You can go to the backup, and restore blade,
and you would see the full backups which
are happening on the server daily, and
the timestamp at which the backups are occurring,
you have full visibility into that.
When developers, DBAs generally when they
are running their MySQL engine they
often have to do performance tuning,
and there is something called the slow query log in MySQL engine.
Slow query log is something where you
can optionally log your queries,
which are performing slow, and you
can define from the sole parameter that
configuration, or the threshold
at which you want to log the queries.
You would come here, you'd add the slow query log,
or if you want audit logs as well, and you could
stream that log to the Log Analytics workspace.
Once you stream the log to the Log Analytics workspace
there are some kind of workbook reports available to you,
which you can use to get query performance insights.
What are my queries running slow?
How can I quickly visualize those queries?
You would come here, and you would see
here the kind of reports which we have.
You can click on that,
and let's say I want to see in last 48 hours,
how many queries are running.
Then you would come here,
now let's say you are not happy with this report,
you would want that hey
I want to see rather than top five queries,
I want to see top 10 queries that's
your preference, and that's how you used to do things.
You're going to click here, click "Edit" and
now if you come here you can edit the query as well,
The Kusto query, and here you can specify,
I want to see the top 10 queries,
click on "Run Query" to make sure that it runs
successfully, and once you are happy, and
you see the 10 queries now you are ready to see
if this workbook, and that becomes
your own personalized workbook which you can
use for quick query tuning exercises.
If you see the expedience at every step those are
the controls which we have provided to
our users, and we're not done yet,
we're just getting started with the GA. We have a lot to do in
this space but hopefully this will
make the transition for the users much easier,
with more control and flexibility for them.
>> Yes, definitely. I mean this is really cool, and I
think a lot of times when people move to
a platform as a service they think hey
I'm going to lose all the control, but you just
showed how it's really easy but you still have
that control, and I think that's the beauty, and
the power of Pads as I sometimes say.
One thing we haven't touched on that I wanted to ask about,
are there high availability options for Flexible Server?
>> Great point. Again,
drawing the analogy with the driverless car it's like now
you are ready with the configuration
but you and I was wondering hey,
what if something goes wrong
while driving what am I options there.
That's how you can think about high availability option.
Here when you're creating
your MySQL Flexible Server you have
an option to turn on high availability mode.
We've kept in as an opt-in option because it doubles the cost,
but when you turn on high availability mode,
you would specify that okay,
there are two options available.
Zone redundant high-availability mode,
this is an option which gives you
the maximum uptime with four lines of SLA uptime guarantee.
When you opt-in for zone
redundant high-availability server and create the server
a hot standby server is created across
the zone and the data is synchronously replicated,
and in case of any kind of failures we
automatically failover to the standby.
In addition to that, you can also do
a forced failure or a user-initiated failure.
But we also learn from our users in some cases,
the latency across the zones can be high.
Some customers want to trade in
availability for better performance and better latency,
and for those customers,
they can opt-in for seems on high availability in
this case the hot standby is in the same zone as the primary,
you still have the VM level of isolation
the data is still replicated but it is within the same zone
and timelessly guarantee which you'll get is
99.95 and the rest
of the configuration is seen and you get better performance.
We don't lose all the performance as well.
>> Wow, that's pretty cool. It seems
like there are a lot of options
depending on what your workload requirements might be.
My final question as we start to wrap up are there
any cost advantages to moving to MySQL Flexible Server on Azure?
>> That's a great question and it tells me now you're
convinced about driverless car and now
you're trying to evaluate like okay what is the
otherwise like should I go for it.
We commissioned the Enterprise Strategy Group
to perform a study on
the economic value which a customer will gain when
migrating to Azure Database for MySQL Flexible Server.
Here are the key findings,
which they came up with.
All this is possible.
You can have around 48 percent of
cost savings just by moving to MySQL Flexible Server.
All this is possible by leveraging features like start-stop,
with stop feature will allow you to stop the server for
up to 30 days and you're billing stops immediately.
This is very useful for the DevTest scenarios when you are
testing and your developers are
developing and then you stop the server when not in use.
You can start your new development on Burstable skew,
it starts at six dollars starting December,
we have lowered the cost and cut down the cost as well.
Further now once you are ready for production you can right-size
it and once you are good and
the server is running in production you can procure
reserved instances which can give you
up to 63 percent of the cost savings for them.
With all these cost optimization control
you can have significant cost savings,
by just moving your database workload
to Azure Database for MySQL Flexible Server.
>> Awesome. Thanks so much Parik.
This has been a great episode not only am I
convinced that I could buy a driverless car but
I'm also convinced that I'm ready for
Azure Database for MySQL Flexible Server.
Thanks so much for coming on the show.
To our viewers,
we put some links in the description where you can go learn more.
We hope you'll check this out,
really awesome I'm going to go play with it
right after we stop this recording.
But again thanks so much Parik,
to our viewers if you like
this episode go ahead and give it a like,
give us a comment and we hope to see
you next time on Data Exposed.
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