February 24-26, 2027
Montreal, Canada
Autopsy of a Cascading Outage caused by a MySQL Crashing Bug
Once upon a time, a query triggered a crashing bug. After automated failure handling, the application re-sent the query, and MySQL crashed again. This triggered a cascading failure, which resulted in datastore unavailability. Unfortunately, mistakes made during incident response led to avoidable data loss. This talk covers what happened, how we handled the incident, what we learned, and the infrastructure changes we made to prevent recurrence.
Jean-François Gagné
(self-employed)
I am Jean-François (J-F), a System Engineer and MySQL Expert with 23 years of experience, recognised as a MySQL Rockstar (2024) and MySQL Community Contributor Award recipient (2018). Over the last 12 years, I have solved reliability and scalability challenges at Booking.com, HubSpot, MessageBird, Aiven, and Proton. Before MySQL, I worked as a Linux SysAdmin, Telco Architect, and Programmer. At university, I studied Cache Consistency in Distributed Systems and Group Communication Protocols.
