Tag: community

MySQL Community Awards 2015: Call for Nominations!

MySQL

The 2015 MySQL Community Awards event will take place, as usual, in Santa Clara, during the Percona Live MySQL Conference & Expo, April 2015.

The MySQL Community Awards is a community based initiative. The idea is to publicly recognize contributors to the MySQL ecosystem. The entire process of discussing, voting and awarding is controlled by an independent group of community members, typically based of past winners or their representatives, as well as known contributors.

It is a self-appointed, self-declared, self-making-up-the-rules-as-it-goes committee. It is also very aware of the importance of the community; a no-nonsense, non-political, adhering to tradition, self criticizing committee.

The Call for Nominations is open. We are seeking the community’s assistance in nominating candidates in the following categories: Continue reading » “MySQL Community Awards 2015: Call for Nominations!”

MySQL Community Awards 2014: the Winners

MySQL

The MySQL Community Awards initiative is an effort to acknowledge and thank individuals and corporates for their contributions to the MySQL ecosystem. It is a from-the-community, by-the-community and for-the-community effort. The committee is composed of an independent group of community members of different orientation and opinion, themselves past winners or known contributors to the community.

The 2014 community awards were presented on April 3rd, 2014, during the community event at the Percona Live conference. The winners are:

MySQL Community Awards: Community Contributor of the year 2014

  • Colin Charles
    Colin’s list of service to the MySQL Community goes back almost 10 years. He was a community engineer starting in 2005, chaired some of the O’Reilly MySQL conferences, ran the MySQL projects for Google Summer of Code. As a partner and Chief Evangelist for Monty program, he continues to promote and grow the MySQL ecosystem. Though it’s his job, he goes above and beyond, driven by his passion for open source and MySQL.
  • Frédéric Descamps
    Frederic organizes the MySQL & Friends Devroom at FOSDEM every year. He worked towards making a true community driven event participated by all key players. in 2014 the MySQL & Friends devroom also presented a shared booth/stand regrouping Oracle, MariaDB/SkySQL and Percona engineers and developers.
  • Geoffrey Anderson
    Geoffrey is organizor & moderator at DBHangops: a bi-weekly community hangout discussing all things MySQL. The hangouts are free to join, and are streamed live and stored for later playback via YouTube.
    Geoffrey works to provide with content, and leads the hangouts with good spirit. DBHangOps makes for a good knowledge sharing media.

MySQL Community Awards: Application of the year 2014

  • Galera
    Galera provides MySQL with synchronous replication, offering a long time sought for High Availability solution for MySQL. It is fast becoming one of the main product/technology everyone is building next-gen businesses around. It is an important part of the renaissance of what’s next for the “ecosystem”.
  • Random Query Generator
    Random Query Generator has found hundreds of problems with its random generation of queries, because often the most serious bugs are outside of developers’ expectations and their test cases. Engineers who work on MySQL and its derivatives have been able to vastly improve the quality of the database because of it. Random Query Generator has positively effected every single user in the MySQL ecosystem, mostly without them even knowing it.
    RQG was originally created by Philip Stoev, and has attracted further contributors over the years.

MySQL Community Awards: Corporate Contributor of the year 2014

  • Oracle
    Oracle has continued to show its commitment to MySQL with the 5.6 release and work in progress on 5.7. MySQL 5.6 might be the best release ever with significant improvements for InnoDB and replication (performance, GTIDs, parallel apply) including significant changes from the community. The 5.7 release has equally high goals for making replication better (enhanced semi-sync) and making InnoDB faster on big multi-core servers. We also appreciate the continued involvement, excellence and passion of the support and community teams.
  • BinLogic
    BinLogic has been a great steward of the MySQL Community in one of the fastest growing technology hubs, Latin America. BinLogic created the MySQL, NoSQL and Cloud Solutions day in 2012 and repeated the event in 2013, drawing in notable speakers from the community.

Continue reading » “MySQL Community Awards 2014: the Winners”

MySQL Community Awards 2014: Call for Nominations!

MySQL

The 2014 MySQL Community Awards event will take place, as usual, in Santa Clara, April 2014, during the Percona Live MySQL Conference & Expo (currently scheduled at Thursday, April 3rd 2014).

The MySQL Community Awards is a community based initiative. The idea is to publicly recognize contributors to the MySQL ecosystem. The entire process of discussing, voting and awarding is controlled by an independent group of community members, typically based of past winners or their representatives, as well as known contributors.

It is a self-appointed, self-declared, self-making-up-the-rules-as-it-goes committee. It is also very aware of the importance of the community; a no-nonsense, non-political, adhering to tradition, self criticizing committee.

The Call for Nominations is open. We are seeking the community’s assistance in nominating candidates in the following categories:

MySQL Community Awards: Community Contributor of the year 2014

This is a personal award; a winner would a person who has made contribution to the MySQL ecosystem. This could be via development, advocating, blogging, speaking, supporting, etc. All things go.

MySQL Community Awards: Application of the year 2014

An application, project, product etc. which supports the MySQL ecosystem by either contributing code, complementing its behaviour, supporting its use, etc. This could range from a one man open source project to a large scale social service.

MySQL Community Awards: Corporate Contributor of the year 2013

A company who made contribution to the MySQL ecosystem. This might be a corporate which released major open source code; one that advocates for MySQL; one that help out community members by… anything.

Continue reading » “MySQL Community Awards 2014: Call for Nominations!”

Percona Live 2014 schedule released; BoF and Lightning Talks Call for Papers continues

MySQL

The complete tutorial & session schedule for Percona Live MySQL Conference & Expo 2014 is released. This schedule offers both a sense of achievement as well as a sense of regret; for I believe the schedule is very good, and yet some good proposals had to be left out.

This is an inevitable result of a conference that is popular and receives far more proposals than can fit within the time frames. This conference offers 96 session slots and 16 3-hour tutorial slots. We got well over 300 proposals — I’m not even sure how to count them — and they just can’t all fit in. My sincere apologies to all those left out. A proposal of mine was just rejected yesterday from another conference; I can sympathize and empathize with all turned down.

As part of our interest in having a diversity of talks and speakers, we have promoted talks by less frequent speakers and newly presenting companies. We are happy to grow the community!

Although titled “Percona Live”, this conference’s program is managed by a diverse and independent committee. We had good discussions and some very good thinking and advice were offered. I’m happy to acknowledge and thank the committee members:

  • Cédric Peintre, Dailymotion
  • Giuseppe Maxia, Continuent
  • Ivan Zoratti, SkySQL
  • Jay Janssen, Percona
  • Jeremy Cole, Google
  • Laine Campbell, PalominoDB (now Blackbird, congrats!)
  • Liz van Dijk, Percona
  • Roland Bouman, Pentaho
  • Tim Callaghan, Tokutek
  • Todd Farmer, Oracle
  • myself, Outbrain

Looking at the schedule I’m as always eager to attend many more sessions than I can; until I get more replicas of myself, It’s again down to choosing between multiple prominent talks at each time slot.

Thank you to all those who submitted a proposal! (It’s cool, just saying)

Birds of a Feather, Lightning Talks

Call for papers continues! You are encouraged to submit your proposals until end of January. These proposals are reviewed by the committee, and eventually chosen and scheduled by Giuseppe Maxia. See also:

Why a professional conference must have a committee, and what that committee does

MySQL

What exactly is it that a conference committee does? This post comes as response to a comment on A sneak peek at the Percona Live MySQL Conference & Expo 2014, reading:

Why the same committee each year? Community should vote on proposals and committee should just work schedule,etc.

I’ll pick the glove and shed some light into the work of the committee. While this specific comment related to the Percona Live conference, I trust that my opinions expressed below apply just as well to any (technical?) professional conference; the point below can equally apply to conferences from Oracle MySQL Connect, O’Reilly Velocity to FOSDEM & PyCon.

I can sum up the entire answer with one word: “Discussion”. For a breakdown, please read through.

First, what’s not feasible with community-based voting, and what looks very wrong

So why not open up a voting system and let the community do the rating? I always disliked the “send an SMS to this number to vote for X” approach. It is so unbalanced and unreliable: if I were to submit a proposal describing how my company invented/develops/uses X to do great things, I can expect my co-workers to vote for me. In fact, my company would possibly ask my co-workers to do so. I stand a better chance if I work in a large company; less so in a small company.

Anonymous votes tend to be touched by politics. I could vote for my company, against a competing product, for my friends, against people I dislike, and none the wiser. We can take away anonymity, which means my votes will be public, which means they are visible to all. In which case my ranking will be affected by what people I rate would think of me; which means my rating would not be based on strictly professional/technical grounds.

But before we drop into this endless pit, let’s consider: will I, as a KMyPyVelocirails community member, really engage in reviewing over 300 submissions? How many members of my community would take so many hours of their time to do so? Let me clarify, this is a part-time job. It requires time, and it requires a mindset. I’m guessing here that you cannot count on everyone rating all talks. Some more prominent talks will be reviewed by more people, others may be left little to not reviewed in the first place.

The idea of a purely community based rating is romantic and beautiful, but not feasible.

And then there’s the discussion. Let’s look at some of the things the committee is engaged in to clarify.

Duties, responsibility and actions of a conference committee

The following discussion cannot be an exhaustive description of a committee’s work, but it can give a good glimpse into its scope. We begin with the commitment the members take upon themselves: to invest their time and will in the committee’s duties. Once you join in, you are expected to work and deliver. Continue reading » “Why a professional conference must have a committee, and what that committee does”

common_schema roadmap thoughts

MySQL

I’m happy with common_schema; it is in fact a tool I use myself on an almost daily basis. I’m also happy to see that it gains traction; which is why I’m exposing a little bit of my thoughts on general future development. I’d love to get feedback.

Supported versions

At this moment, common_schema supports MySQL >= 5.1, all variants. This includes 5.5, 5.6, MySQL, Percona Server & MariaDB.

5.1 is today past end of line, and I’m really missing the SIGNAL/RESIGNAL syntax that I would like to use; I can do in the meanwhile with version-specific code such as /*!50500 … */. Nevertheless, I’m wondering whether I will eventually have to:

  • Support different branches of common_schema (one that supports 5.1, one that supports >= 5.5)
  • Stop support for 5.1

Of course community-wise, the former is preferred; but I have limited resources, so I would like to make a quick poll here:

[poll id=”3″]

I’ll use the poll’s results as a vague idea of what people use and want. Or please use comments below to sound your voice!

rdebug

This was a crazy jump at providing a stored routine debugger and debugging API. From some talk I made I don’t see this getting traction. For the time being, I don’t see that I will concentrate my efforts on this. Actually it is almost complete. You can step-into, step-out, step-over, set breakpoints, read variables, modify variables — it’s pretty cool. Continue reading » “common_schema roadmap thoughts”

common_schema & openark-kit in the media: #DBHangOps, OurSQL

MySQL

#DBHangOps

I had the pleasure of joining into @DBHangOps today, and speak about common_schema and openark-kit. What was meant to be a 15 minute session turned to be 50 — sorry, people, I don’t talk as much at home, but when it comes to my pet projects…

I also realized I was missing on a great event: DBHangOps is a hangout where you can chat and discuss MySQL & related technologies with friends and colleagues, with whom you typically only meet at conferences. I will certainly want to attend future events.

Thanks to John Cesario and Geoffrey Anderson who invited me to talk, and to the friends and familiar faces who attended; I was happy to talk about my work, and very interested in hearing about how it’s being put to use. We also had time to discuss ps_helper with no other than Mark Leith!

The video is available on Twitter/YouTube.

OurSQL

openark-kit has also been featured on the OurSQL podcast by Sheeri & Gerry, who did great coverage of some tools. I will disclose that more is to come; I’m happy this is in capable hands and look further to hear the next episode!

 

Impressions from Percona Live 2013

MySQL

At the airport, trying to sum up my impressions from Percona Live 2013 conference in Santa Clara.

Woo! Hard to sum up four excellent days. Shall I review the great talks I’ve been to? The keynotes? The well organized events?

You know what, skip it. There was ONE thing that overshadowed everything. It was the ONE thing for me that was the pure essence of the conference and its greatest joy:

Meeting and talking to a great many great people!

I was fortunate to meet up with so many people; none that I planned; things just went in such way that I engaged in so many conversations with so many people. I found myself talking about hamsters, peacocks, living in the village, living in the city, working from home, commute, relocation, working with your spouse, life in Israel, life in Argentina, prisons in the US, having many children, gun control, politics (heaven forbid!), fruit, vegetables, breakfasts, open source, community, buying (non-expensive) presents to your kids, new ventures, zen, philosophy, capitalism, socialism, books, being who you are, weddings, Java, scripting, NoSQL, how to contribute to an open source project, … the list goes on.

I was “adopted” by the PalominoDB team at Pedro’s, crash-partied on Pythian fellows, talked technical (or non technical) with Tokutek guys, meeting up with Oracle people (finally I get the faces behind the names!); the companies do not matter, I’m just throwing in names. The people are awesome! Representing their companies on the technical side, and being purely interesting people on the personal side, I met with men and women from all over the community. Apologies: impossible to list all nor account for!

It’s great to have a place and time where we all meet together.

The bottom line? I am fortunate to have my current profession: I enjoy my work, and the people I meet are fantastic and of the highest quality!

Thanks all with whom I’ve met, and for all of those with whom I haven’t had the chance to speak: see you next time!

Percona Live 2013 schedule released!

MySQL

I’m happy to report the release of the program schedule for the next Percona Live event, April 2013.

While you can see there are still some “TODO”s, and minor scheduling changes still to go, the overall reviewing process is complete, and the schedule is sound.

The committee has reviewed over 250 submissions in total, sessions and tutorials. It took two months to review the sessions and finalize the schedule. There were very good submissions, and it wasn’t till I started building the schedule that I realized just how many.

You know the feeling: you’re at a conference, and there’s this time slot where you just can’t make up your mind which session to attend. As it turns out, anyway I look at it, I get this at each and every single time slot in this schedule. Hopefully all attendees should feel similarly.

What can you expect to find in the Santa Clara, April conference?

As always, we get variety of topics. First day is tutorials, which I already mentioned, followed by three days of sessions and keynotes.

  • Some topics you can guess: always place for good backup practice, performance optimizations for your InnoDB deployment, good indexing strategies and more.
  • Open source and emerging technologies are well covered: from Tungsten, Galera/Percona XtraDB Cluster, NDB Cluster to MHA, HAProxy, Hadoop, Percona Toolkit and more.
  • MariaDB has good coverage, as well as Percona Server.
  • Scale topics such as sharding, building large deployments,Big Data.
  • Cloud is well represented, too. Deployments on Amazon, Google Cloud, OpenStack, SkySQL Cloud Data Suite; interesting content on virtualization.
  • Optimizer, better queries, query evaluation plans.
  • Replication, of course, is as always a hot topic, this year in particular due to anticipated 5.6 release
  • Speaking of 5.6, a lot of content on that, too. PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA, InnoDB, partitions, GIS and more…
  • Case studies: can you do without them? Get to hear how big companies used product/project X, what it took to make it work, how it helped them grow.
  • Chance to get up to speed on third party solutions: Akiban, Tokutek, ScaleDB…
  • Hardware: SSDs are all the rage. How do you nest choose and configure your hardware and deployment?
  • Best practices, security, monitoring, NoSQL…
  • And, I can’t list everything, but a LOT of good, unique content!

I will write some more on specific sessions I find that are of unique interest.

Finally, this is my first time acting as committee chairman, and so much of this work was new to me, and I got to learn it on the fly. Thankfully, the committee is composed of experienced conference veterans, not to mention experts, who gave good advice. I was happy to ask for their advice and happy to accept. I wish to thank the committee members for their kindness and openness! (That doesn’t mean I’m buying you all your beer though!)

Percona Live 2013: Tutorials schedule released!

MySQL

I’m pleased to announce the availability of the Tutorials Schedule for Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo, 2013.

This schedule comes as the outcome of hard work put by the reviewing committee members. Thanks! This work is much appreciated!

We got a good number of submissions. We’ve also reached out to prominent speakers and companies we felt would give great tutorials. All were reviewed, rated, discussed, compared; re-reviewed; some required further feedback from speakers.

Thank you to all speakers for submitting their proposals! I’m very sorry if your tutorial didn’t make it through — we have good tutorials left out — there’s only so much time in one day!

What can you expect to see in the tutorials?

The single day tutorials should appeal to beginners, seasonal DBAs, developers and database experts alike. Talks target different levels, in 6 different tracks.

I think the king & queen of the 2013 conference will be High Availability and the Cloud. This follows the trend of maturing HA solutions for MySQL and the emergence of MySQL cloud offerings or opportunities.

  • We will have MySQL on Amazon, NDB Cluster, Tungsten Replicator, XtraDB & Galera tutorials, as well as a HA evaluation tutorial. Pick your HA solution: chances are there’s a good tutorial on the subject. If not – don’t worry, lot’s of HA sessions expected as well.
  • Not everything is HA. You will get the chance to learn about InnoDB architecture and tuning, Xtrabackup old and new features, and a full day operational DBA.
  • Down to basics, learn about how to Build your indexes, get to know your Sphinx search capabilities, or learn about TokuDB implementation.
  • Or you could learn about Debugging and crash testing, or Advanced query optimizer tuning.

The tutorials day is in particular important to settle as early as possible; it has a separate pricing model than the rest of the conference, and offers more in-depth drill downs into the particular technologies. So we’re happy to make it through, and encourage you to register. Thank you!