Tag: mysqlconf

It’s *that time* of the year

MySQL

Even without attending the Percona Live conference in Santa Clara, you could tell something big was going on.

One way of measuring it was by looking at the flow of announcements. Here’s a brief list, and apologies if I’ve missed anyone:

All within the first days of the conference.

What this means, over the surface

I read a post by someone who was ranting about Oracle making so many announcements just as the conference began. He obviously suspected there was no coincidence. I got the impression he was looking at it the wrong way: as if Oracle’s announcements came to discourage the relevance of the conference.

I beg the opposite.

Continue reading » “It’s *that time* of the year”

common_schema talk at Percona Live

MySQL

Are you attending PerconaLive?

Allow me to suggest you attend the Common Schema: a framework for MySQL server administration session on April 12, 14:00 – 14:50 @ Ballroom F.

This talk is by none other than Roland Bouman. Roland co-authored parts of common_schema, and is a great speaker.

I have a personal interest, of course, being the author of most of the components in common_schema. I would like to convert you to a supporter of this project. I know a few very smart people who think this project is an important tool. I would like more people to get to know it. Eventually, I would like developers and DBAs alike to consider it an inseparable part of any MySQL installation.

Then I shall have world domination, Bwa ha ha!

PS,

Have fun, I will unfortunately not attend myself this year. Having been on the program committee, I can tell it’s going to be a great conference!

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”

Percona Live: MySQL Conference And Expo 2012 – a note on proposals

MySQL

As a member of the conference committee I review the session and tutorial proposals for the Percona Live MySQL conference in Santa Clara, 2012.

The sessions are expected to be technical, and I’m happy the proposals follow this guideline. I use Giuseppe‘s and Baron‘s general guidelines for submitting a proposal. I wish to humbly add a couple notes myself.

Be fairly brief

Explain your session/tutorial as clearly as you can. The reader should be able to get the general impression of the session from two or three paragraphs. Some can make a point in two sentences; for most it would take somewhat more.

If you’re going to talk about some database feature, for example, please do not write the manual for that feature. That’s for the session itself. Just explain how you’re going to discuss the feature, and why it should be of interest (e.g. what the benefits of this feature are, the risks or pitfalls, the ingenious C code behind it or the quirks of the operating system involved).

Clarify

It’s important for me to understand two things when reading a proposal, which establish the grounds for better evaluating the proposal:

  • Who the target audience is (newbies, developers, DBAs, Linux internal experts etc.)
  • To what depth are you going to deliver the content you describe.

That is not to say you should explicitly state “This session is for MySQL DBAs”, but the attendee should be able to easily decide whether your session appeals to his type of work or expertise. I, myself, have happened upon sessions that were completely different from what I expected. To illustrate, I give two examples, while not disclosing the exact details:

  • A session which was about locking in database. I got the impression it was about ways to avoid locking, issues with mutexes etc. It turned out to be a discussion between the presenter and a few member of the audience about the specific code internals, lines 667-684 in the lock_module.cc file, and the recently reported bug. To me it was more like the weekly rnd meeting of some company. I couldn’t understand anything of the entire talk.
  • A session promising insight on working out great scale-out with some product: I was expecting to hear of the “DOs and DON’Ts”, or of great configuration and implementation tricks on the subject. However, it turned out to be more of a general talk on “how we used the product in our company and found it to work great”.

The two sessions above were perfectly valid, and had their place in the conference. But were poorly described in the two respects I mentioned.

A great submission, in my opinion, is one where attendees get what the expect, and don’t shyly leave the conference room 15 minutes into the talk.

Submit a proposal here.

Impressions from MySQL conf 2011, part IV

MySQL

This post concludes my impressions from some of the talks I’ve been to.

Thursday

I opened this day’s sessions with a smile.

Antony Curtis and Arjen Lentz have authored the OQGraph storage engine a while back. I had every intention to try it out, but never got round to it. Which is why I was happy to find this session in the conference. OQGraph is a specialized engine, and comes to solve hierarchal or otherwise graph-related queries, such as: “who are the descendants of a given node”, “find a route from a to b”, etc. MySQL does not support the RECURSIVE syntax as Oracle does, and does not provide out-of-the-box solution for that.

The syntax is just excellent: you just write something like SELECT * FROM my_graph WHERE from_node = ’empusa fasciata’ AND to_node = ‘homo sapiens’ to find a route. Otherwise just use WHERE from_node = ‘Heathrow Central’ to find all outgoing links. So this is just plain old SQL, no new syntax involved.

I rounded corners. It is also possible (and required) to specify an algorithm. Do you want Djekstra? BFS? You specify it in the query. The result of a route query is a rowset, where each row is a step in the route, along with its sequence within the route. So you can do your ORDER BY, LIMIT etc. I find that syntax-wise, OQGraph is very intuitive! Continue reading » “Impressions from MySQL conf 2011, part IV”

Impressions from MySQL conf 2011, part III: BoF Replication

MySQL

This post continues my impressions from some of the talks I’ve been to. I’ll dedicate this post to a single session.

Wednesday

  • BoF: Replication, Lars Thalmann, Mat Keep (Oracle)

Lars Thallman presented the MySQL 5.5 replication features, as well as the expected 5.6 features. Among other features, one could notice parallel replication, binlog checksums, sub-second resolution and more. There was an open discussion about these features, asking for comments; looking for new ideas and suggestion from the audience.

I can’t possibly cover it all. I’ll note two discussion I participated in, and which have interested me. This also serves for noting down to myself my ideas and thoughts. Continue reading » “Impressions from MySQL conf 2011, part III: BoF Replication”

Impressions from MySQL conf 2011, part II

MySQL

This post continues my impressions from some of the talks I’ve been to.

Wednesday

Grant McAlister described the Amazon RDS offer, which provides with a pre-installed MySQL servers, and supports auto management of replication and high availability. He desribed asynchronous vs. synchronous replication, logical (i.e log shipping & replaying) vs. physical replication.

Amazon implement physical replication by shipping data pages to a secondary, standby server, located at a different availability zone. A transaction does not complete before pages are shipped to, and acknowledged by standby machine. The standby machine writes data pages in parallel. This is similar in concept to DRBD. RDS uses InnoDB, which promises data integrity in case of power/network failure.

The fail over process, in case active master has crashed, involves blocking access to the active master, starting MySQL on standby master (promoted to be active), while changing elastic IP for master to point to promoted master. McAlister said this process takes a few minutes. Live demo resulted at about 4 minutes. Continue reading » “Impressions from MySQL conf 2011, part II”

Impressions from MySQL conf 2011, Part I

MySQL

Having the conference behind now, I’m reviewing some of my impressions and of sessions I attended.

The people

To begin with, this conference was a big success for me, in many respects. The sessions were great (more on that later), but of course, meeting with new people and with familiar people, was the more important part.

I live in Israel, which makes travel to the US very long and expensive. Apparently not many MySQL community members in my neighborhood, so I don’t ever get to meet the faces. The conference makes that possible. I did not participate in all community events, as I had scheduled calls with little girls who miss their father. And I was very much under jet lag. And I have more excuses on demand.

But I did get to meet known faces; people I only knew by name; unfamiliar people who were familiar with my work (fun!); and otherwise just (ex-)strangers.

The sessions

There was a variety of sessions to choose from. Many times, I had to pick one out of two or three sessions I was interested in, running at the same time. Not all sessions appeal to one in the same way, but looking back, I find there were a lot of GOOD sessions I attended. I mostly like sessions that are very technical; preferably drilling into details of algorithms & implementation. Continue reading » “Impressions from MySQL conf 2011, Part I”

Slides for “openark-kit: MySQL utilities for everyday use”

MySQL

Today I have delivered my talk, openark-kit: MySQL utilities for everyday use, at the O’REILLY  MySQL Conference 2011.

The slides are uploaded to the O’Reilly site, and I’m attaching them here as well. Feel free to download the PDF: openark-kit-mysqlconf11.pdf

I wish to thank all who attended my talk!

 

Would you be my friend on mysqlconf? (tempting offer inside)

MySQL

I’m still throwing papers to the trash and starting all over, fixing, rewriting and improving my talk at mysqlconf 2011, where I will be presenting openark-kit: MySQL utilities for everyday use.

However I’ve got something up my sleeve: a benefit many can enjoy, that’ll make me a respectful, popular and sought after speaker. While others may try and lure you with such earthly temptations as a 20% off discount, I am in a position to offer you a more spiritual gift: my friendship!

See, if you become my friend, I can offer you a 25% discount on the MySQL conference. Yes, that’s 5% more than my competitors! The only thing I ask in return is that you be my friend (hey, it’s called “friends of speaker”). Not like a FB virtual friend, but a real friendship! One where you can buy me beer or dinner!

If you agree to such humane terms, I will be in the position to let you know that all you have to do is fill in mys11fsd in your registration form.

No, wait! I let it slip! Rewrite: You should fill in mys11fsd [will only tell you this password after your commitment to a beer] in your registration form.

Oh no, not again!

Don’t use mys11fsd without talking to me first… You’re not supposed to… Oh, my beer!

Argghhh!