Open Source Database Community Blog: The Story So Far

Recently, we initiated a new project, the Open Source Database Community Blog . One way to think of this is as an online, year round version of the Percona Live conferences. If you have a story to tell, an experience to share, or a lesson to be learned send it along. As long as it’s related to open source database software, their management and application. That’s right. Not just Percona software. Any open source database software of all formats.

Unlike Percona Live, though, we are not limited by time or space. All submissions are welcome as long as they follow somesimple guidelines.

We have already had some excellent posts, and in case this is news to you, here’s a recap:

• Renato Losio wrote this succinct how-to article Enabling KMS encryption for a running Amazon RDS instance  along with a very useful  how-to, How to Automate Minor Version Upgrades for MySQL on RDS
• David Berube provide d an excellent explanation of why character sets matter and how to go about changing if your setup is not ideal in Character Sets: Migrating to utf8mb4 with pt_online_schema_change
• PingCap’s Shawn Ma wrote a detailed technical blog about TiSpark: More Data Insights, No More ETL
• Jean-François Gagné presented a well researched and well argued case for MySQL or Percona to consider incorporating a Nice Feature in MariaDB 10.3: no InnoDB Buffer Pool in Core Dumps
• Timur Solodovnikov presented an Easy and Effective Way of Building External Dictionaries for ClickHouse with Pentaho Data Integration Tool

You can also read Jean-François’s personal blog (unsolicited, but greatly appreciated) on how the process of getting his post up and running went.

About the posts … and what’s in it for you

All of the writers are giving freely of their time and knowledge. So .. if you would just like to read some alternative independent viewpoints, try the blog. If you want to support the writers with constructive exchanges and comments, that would be great.

If you would like to go a little further and provide some feedback about what you’d like to see via our blog poll, that would be awesome. As a community blog, we want to make sure it hits community interests.

You can alsodrop me a line if there are things that I’ve missed from the poll.

Also, you should know I have the English covered but I am not a technical expert. We don’t want—not would I get—Percona techs to edit or review these blog posts. That’s not the point of the blog!

So, would you consider being a technical editor maybe? Not for all posts, since many of the writers will want to ‘own’ their content. But there could be some new writers who’d appreciate some back up from a senior tech before going ‘live’ with their posts. Might that tech buddy be you?

There’s some more ideas and I have written more about our vision for the blog here.

If you are tempted to write for this, pleaseget in touch, I would love to hear from you. You do not have to be an expert! Content suitable for all levels of experience is welcome.