A Family-Owned Company’s Commitment to Excellence
Since its founding in 1994, Optimum Instruments has remained a family-owned business committed to helping companies capture, log, and share vital sensor data. From rugged data collection tools to advanced wireless monitoring solutions, the company’s mission has always been clear: to provide reliable, high-quality products that engineers and businesses can depend on.
As their offerings expanded to include sensors, data logging, antennas, and specialized software, their customers and demands on their systems grew. While the small team behind Optimum Instruments excelled in delivering innovative hardware solutions, managing their increasingly complex database systems presented a new challenge.
For CEO Ken Smelquist and his son David, who manages engineering and systems administration, maintaining database performance and reliability became a growing concern. Without in-depth database expertise, they faced the stress of troubleshooting issues and the looming risk of downtime affecting their critical applications. Determined to find a more robust solution, they turned to Percona.
The Turning Point: Seeking a Reliable Partner
Recognizing that a strong foundation in database management was essential to their operations, Ken and David began evaluating their MySQL infrastructure with the help of Percona’s experts. The goal was not just to fix immediate pain points but to build a long-term strategy for reliability, scalability, and performance.
Percona recommended a migration to MySQL 8.0, complemented by the Percona Distribution for MySQL and Percona XtraBackup. These tools offered the performance enhancements and availability needed to support Optimum Instruments’ growing data demands. More importantly, Ken and David opted to offload database management entirely to Percona Managed Services, giving them peace of mind and more time to focus on their core business.
Collaboration for Success
The partnership began with a detailed review of Optimum Instruments’ most frequently used database queries. This process uncovered opportunities for optimization, with more than ten actionable changes recommended by Percona. Each improvement was designed to enhance performance, reduce latency, and support seamless data availability—all of which were implemented with positive results.
Once the migration was complete, Percona deployed clusters for critical applications, significantly bolstering system performance and resilience. Moving to MySQL 8.0 also resolved end-of-life concerns for the software, ensuring long-term support and stability.
Today, Optimum Instruments relies on Percona not just for management but for continuous improvement. Through collaborative calls, real-time Slack updates, and insights from tools like Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM), the company is always informed about its database health. Regular reports, such as Top Query Review, provide actionable data that helps Optimum Instruments refine its systems to better serve its customers.Percona solutions are free from vendor lock-in and can be run on any infrastructure in the future, as needed. For the customer, this means that they can stay in control of their decisions around their technology platforms over time, rather than being beholden to any one vendor or supplier. For Minsait, the project could be delivered at a significantly lower cost compared to other providers, while hitting the customer’s requirements around flexibility, speed, and service.
Results That Matter
With Percona as their trusted partner, Ken and David no longer have to worry about the technical intricacies of database management. Instead, they can confidently focus on driving innovation and supporting their customers.
Before working with Percona, we just had single databases that were not as reliable as we wanted to achieve. We started by migrating to clustered environments for availability, and we've progressed to replication and backup strategies and getting the support that we needed. Working with Percona, we have a robust, reliable system that we also don't even have to worry about because if anything ever does go wrong, our services contacts at Percona are already on it. We’ve gone from an implementation that would potentially keep us up at night to one where we can sleep like a baby.
Luis Antonio Juanino Blasco, Product Director at Minsait
For Optimum Instruments, the collaboration with Percona is more than a technical upgrade—it’s a partnership that empowers them to deliver on their promise of reliability to both their customers and their team.
Optimum Instruments partnered with Percona to upgrade to Percona Distribution for MySQL, ensuring improved performance, enhanced availability, and a seamless migration to the latest version of their preferred database platform. By also transitioning to Percona Managed Services, the company entrusted its database management to seasoned experts.
Key Outcomes:
✓ Future-proofed database platform: Migration to Percona Distribution for MySQL resolved end-of-life concerns, while XtraBackup and clustering bolstered system availability and resilience.
✓ Enhanced performance: Optimization of the most frequently used queries significantly improved overall database efficiency.
✓ Expert management and monitoring: Percona Managed Services now provides proactive management, 24/7 monitoring, and hands-on expertise, aligning database operations with the company’s growing demands.
About Optimum Instruments
Optimum Instruments Inc. is a locally owned company headquartered in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Optimum specializes in providing solutions for data acquisition and retrieval through innovative hardware and software designs. The company’s products store internally data read from digital, analog, and SDI-12 sensors and forwards that data through Cellular, Unlicensed Radio, Satellite, WiFi , Bluetooth, USB, RS232 and many other available communication channels. Optimum was founded in 1994 to deliver a simple concept: let customers access their data in as many ways as possible.
Contact Us
To learn more about Percona’s services, contact us at +1-888-401-3401 in North America, +44 (203) 608-6727 in Europe, or sales@percona.com
