Tag: community

Call for Nominations for 2012 MySQL Community Awards

MySQL

This post complements Henrik’s Call for Nominations for 2012 MySQL Community Awards.

Recap: we keep the tradition of awarding MySQL community members for their notable contributions to the MySQL ecosystem.

Previously, the awards were given by MySQL AB/Sun. Later on they were given by the community itself, as will follow this year, when the awards are presented during the Percona Live MySQL Conference & Expo in Santa Clara, this April.

Henrik describes in details the three categories: community contributor, application, corporate contributer -of the year.

A bit more about the categories

To add to Henrik’s description of the categories, keep in mind the following:

  • Community member would be a person. That person could be working by himself/herself, or can be part of some corporate. It does not matter. What matters is the person’s contribution.
  • Application: some code or project which either enhance/complement MySQL (e.g. Replication/HA solution) or uses MySQL. In the latter case, it is important that MySQL role’s in the application is significant. For example, some popular site built with some CMS using MySQL may not qualify, if it could run just the same with PostgreSQL or other databases, or if the owners are not actually aware or at all mindful about the specific database technology they are using.
  • Corporate: we’re still figuring this one out. The general idea is to acknowledge a corporate which, some way or the other, did a good thing to the MySQL ecosystem or the community.

Continue reading » “Call for Nominations for 2012 MySQL Community Awards”

Oracle “Technologist of the Year: Developer” Award

MySQL

I am honored to receive Oracle’s Technologist of the Year: Developer award, formerly Oracle Magazine Editors’ Choice Awards.

Technologist of the Year Award is given for individuals for their technical achievements with regard to Oracle products.

As opposed to community based awards, to win this award one must be nominated by himself or his company. There are several award categories: Developer, DBA, IT Manager etc., and many nominations per category. I have been nominated by my company and am happy to have won the award in the Developer category.

Allow me to take the pleasant opportunity to make some acknowledgements. Continue reading » “Oracle “Technologist of the Year: Developer” Award”

Oracle ACE

MySQL

I am honored to have been nominated for, and to have received the Oracle ACE award.

Nomination for this award is made by Oracle community members, and in this case those being Oracle employees Keith Larson and Dave Stokes. The award is given by Oracle for my involvement in the Oracle/MySQL community and for my contributions.

While open source involvement is generally done in the mere purpose of sharing knowledge and solutions, recognition plays a role in it. For the most part, one who writes blogs wants them to be read, and one who writes code wants it to be downloaded and tested, which is an elemental type of recognition, and what I aim for.

The recognition given by the Oracle ACE award makes for a wonderful complement, being given by the corporate with whose products I’m involved. It is great to get a surprising “Hey, good work” acknowledgement. Sun/MySQL told me that back in 2009, and I was caught utterly unprepared. I am still unprepared!

Thank you, the community, the people from whom I learn and benefit, anyone who ever reads my blogs, who comment, anyone who tries my code, who provides feedback, the multitude of people writing, sharing, blogging, speaking, coding, fixing, spreading, who make it such a great community.

Thank you, Oracle for this award!

Contest for Glory: write a self throttling MySQL query

MySQL

What’s all this about?

I’ve you’ve been to my talk in London, then you’ve already got this as homework. If not, allow me to fill in the details:

I was speaking about MySQL’s programmatic nature in many aspects (best if you read the slides!). We discussed user defined variables, derived tables, ordering constructs, order of evaluation, time suspension and time calculation.

An issue I presented was that of a very long running query. Say it runs for 20 minutes. It kills your I/O. Do you KILL the query or wait? It could terminate in 5 seconds from now, and if you kill it now, you lose everything. But it may yet run for 3 more hours!

We discussed a futuristic feature where the query would gracefully terminate after some designated time. However, futuristic wishes do not help us.

A self throttling query

I suggested the idea for a self throttling query. We know how to throttle writing queries, such as DELETE queries: we break them into small chunks, then work each chunk at a time, setting ourselves to sleep in between chunks. This is how –sleep and –sleep-ratio work in oak-chunk-update. It is how –sleep and –sleep-coef work in pt-archiver.

But can the same be done for SELECT queries? Continue reading » “Contest for Glory: write a self throttling MySQL query”