About the Company
Founded in 1945, is a family-owned company offering a variety of products and services. MacAllister Machinery is the leading Caterpillar dealer for the states of Indiana and Michigan, with 40 locations and growing. They specialize in selling new and used machines, as well as selling parts, providing service, and managing the rental of equipment. MacAllister Machinery supplies and repairs a wide range of high quality new, used, and rebuilt equipment from Caterpillar and over 50 other manufacturers.
The Challenge
MacAllister Machinery grew significantly in a short space of time, expanding into Michigan and inheriting an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) based on Apache and Linux stack. MacAllister Machinery had been using MySQL Community Edition 5.5, but as it came to End of Life (EOL) it became clear that it was time for an upgrade, and they started evaluating alternative software options.
Although MacAllister Machinery has a highly skilled IT staff, technology changes rapidly. It was crucial that their environment was configured correctly for performance and security, and they also wanted the security of knowing that they had an expert team behind them in the event of an issue.
The Solution
MacAllister Machinery upgraded to Percona Server for MySQL v8, running it on two production machines, and two replication servers in order to support their ERP, which is used by the entire company to run their business. This upgrade involved a huge number of integrations, along with a full system upgrade. A lot of testing and changes was required to ensure everything ran smoothly.
MacAllister Machinery was originally running the Community Edition of MySQL, but chose to rely on Percona’s expertise and upgrade to Percona Server for MySQL for several reasons:
- Percona Server for MySQL is a free, compatible drop-in replacement for any MySQL database and is fully compatible with MySQL, unlike alternatives such as MariaDB. It provides all the features of the Community Edition of MySQL 8.0, as well as additional enterprise features for free
- Along with Percona Server for MySQL, Percona offers additional free enterprise-grade MySQL software including Percona XtraDB Cluster and Percona XtraBackup
- After every new release by MySQL Community Edition, Percona’s Engineering team performs a merge of patches onto the MySQL CE code base, so the core software is completely up-to-date
- Percona Server for MySQL utilizes Percona XtraDB Cluster, an improved alternative storage engine to InnoDB – which is used in the Community Edition of MySQL. It also offers features such as Threadpooling, Audit Logging, and external authentication which are not available in the Community Edition of MySQL
- Finally, MacAllister Machinery was excited about adopting Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM). PMM is a best-of-breed open source database monitoring solution which helps reduce complexity, optimize performance, and improve the security of business-critical database environments, no matter where they are located or deployed
Working with Percona
MacAllister Machinery has received dedicated MySQL Support from Percona for several years. As a result, they felt confident in upgrading to Percona Server for MySQL and continuing to rely on Percona to support their business.
MacAllister Machinery is looking forward to using Percona Monitoring and Management, which gives them better insight into their application and includes data on users, site hot spots, common efforts, blocks, etc. It is important to MacAllister Machinery to find areas which need to be improved and to actively work on these to ensure their environment is operating at the optimum level.
