Since the age of 10 I’ve always been passionate about computers. I’ve been working with them ever since. In 2005 I got my degree in computer science. I used to work at a major Belgian university where I was developing the e-learning applications. In that position, I was the one who looked after the databases. From there on I grew to be their MySQL DBA. In 2017 I left the university and joined Pythian as a MySQL Database Consultant. Currently I am working at PlanetScale to support large enterprise type customers running MySQL at scale.

Presentations

23x

Are you ready to leave MySQL 8.0 behind?

MySQL 8.0 was released GA in April 2018 so it turns 8 years old this year. In April 2026 it will receive its last patch update and then it will go end-of-life. I will run you through the deprecations that are gone in the next LTS release 8.4 and how too avoid breaking your existing tooling.

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23x

Data on Kubernetes / stateless storage

Everyone is running their applications on Kubernetes these days, most of the time the application servers are stateless so it is easy to do so because the database behind the application is responsible for storing the state. What if you would also want to run you database on the same Kubernetes stack. Will you use stateful sets? Will you use network attached storage? These types of storage are introducing a lot of disk latency because of the mandatory network hops. This is why in many environments the database servers still are dedicated machines that are treated as pets while the rest of the fleet is more like cattle.

In this session I will speak about how we run our databases on Kubernetes by using the local ephemeral storage to store your data and also how we are confident we will not loose it in the process of doing so!

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22x

Introduction to Vitess - Open Source Sharding framework for MySQL

Vitess is an open-source database solution for deploying, scaling, and managing large clusters of MySQL instances. It was designed to support high levels of read and write traffic for applications that need to scale horizontally across many servers.

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21x

MySQL connection handling and pooling

MySQL is famous for running the web. This implies that a lot of connections to will be made from, in most cases, many webservers to a limited number of database servers. We'll discuss how MySQL handles this and how connection pooling can help you optimise this process. We'll also talk about ProxySQL and how this can help to easily implement a connection pool for your MySQL.

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20x

MySQL HA with ProxySQL, Consul, and Orchestrator

At VitalSource, we paired with Pythian to design a high-availability system using Orchestrator, consul, and ProxySQL that was specific to our environment.

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20x

Introduction to Vitess, sharding framework for MySQL

Vitess (vitess.io) is a framework built on top of MySQL for horizontally scaling MySQL. It was designed at Google for scaling YouTube through hyper-growth and has since then been release to Cloud Native Compute Foundation (CNCF) were it is considered a "graduated project".

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18x

Implementing MySQL Database-as-a-Service using OSS tools

This session will discuss how to setup your own fully automated MySQL-as-a-service solely out of open source tools. We will discuss how to use ProxySQL to create a separation of the MySQL topology from the application layer; and how to manage topologies with GitHub's Orchestrator.

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