Speaker Interview: Max Mether

Max Mether is giving a talk on Sharding Your Data with Spider. No, not with the arachnid, but with the Spider Storage Engine. The SCALE Team caught up with Max and asked him a few questions about his presentation, which is being given on SCALE 13x Saturday at 1:30.

Q: Could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little about your background?

A: Sure, I am originally from Finland and now based in Atlanta, GA after a number of years in France. I got into Linux and Open Source during my studies in Finland where I then started working for MySQL AB back in 2001. After a few acquisitions I was part of starting up MariaDB AB (then SkySQL Ab) as an alternative to MySQL where I now run the Professional Services team. I have a background as an instructor and I love speaking at events about cool new things.

Q: You're giving a talk on Sharding Your Data with Spider. Without tipping your hand on the actual talk, can you give us an idea of what we might expect?

A: Sure, I would be happy to. In this talk I will generally discuss sharding a bit; when it's needed, why it's needed, look at some different approaches on how (and where) it can be done etc. Sharding is something you might need when you have a large amount of data, but what "large" is is not really easy to define and typically has a lot to do with your use case.

The technology I will specifically talk more about is Spider, which is a storage engine in MySQL/MariaDB that allows you to distribute (or shard) your data according to partitioning rules. There are many interesting features with Spider, for example that it is completely transparent (ie you see it as an unsharded table) and that it is behind the optimizer thus allowing you to optimize queries between sharded and non-sharded tables in more optimal ways. I guess that's a long answer already, for more information come to my talk

Q: Is this your first visit to SCALE? If so, what are your expectations? If not, can you give us your impressions of the event?

A: I've been to SCALE a couple of times as a speaker before. The first time I came (maybe SCALE 9x?) I was really impressed with the size and the organization of the event. There is a huge number of parallel tracks at SCALE with really good talks and the talks are also very well attended. Very impressive, it's definitely a show I like to come to.

Q: Is there anything else you'd like to add?

A: No, I appreciate being selected to speak at SCALE and also this opportunity to talk about my talk and the exciting technologies I will talk about.

[SCALE Team interview by Larry Cafiero]