Tag: PerconaLive

Percona Live – call for “Hall of Shame” talks

MySQL

We’ve got some spare time on Percona Live during the lightning talks session, and are spontaneously calling for “Hall of Shame” submissions.

What is this about?

We just had a wonderful Reversim Summit a couple weeks back, where we held the “Hall of Shame” session. We are used to hear talks about success stories and great new technologies. Well, this session is your chance to come up and say: “I messed up, and I’m proud of it!”

You will have 3-4 minutes to tell us about how you once accidentally dropped your database; corrupted your data; brought your company’s service down. The greater the damage, the greater the appeal! But we’re looking for the funny edge – not for a tragedy. There are no slides. Just a “Hall of Shame” screen behind you.

The response we got on Reversim Summit? It was amazing. The audience was literally in tears; there were such hilarious stories that we could hardly keep up. People were spontaneously offering their stories and the organizers had to hold them back.

And yet, you will be telling about your mess up – so please make sure you feel OK about this. For what it’s worth, I will contribute my own shameful, shameful story.

So, this is new & experimental for the Percona Live conference, and we don’t have many slots. If no one submits – that’s OK. If too many submit, we’ll have to cut most. As conferences go, we may end up with a last moment open timeslot, so if you’re spontaneous that could be your chance.

Ready to submit?

Please send an email to mysql.hallofshame@gmail.com with a brief description of what you want to share. I’ll be reviewing these submissions and either approve, reject or hold you on a waiting list. I assume this will go by First Come First Served. The deadline for submissions is Friday, Mar 14th.

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”

Percona Live: MySQL Conference & Expo 2014: call for papers & guidelines

MySQL

Call for papers for Percona Live MySQL Conference & Expo 2014 is open. As in previous year, I have the honour of being conference committee chairman, which means I’m in particular part of the reviewing committee. I wish to add to Giuseppe’s fine observations and suggestions. On submitting a talk, please consider the following:

  • Make it right the first time (an old advice by Baron). We will not be able to review your proposal more than once. We will not be iterating the proposals again and again to see what’s changed, nor will we have a feed for updated content. We will not be able to diff any changes you made to your proposal. Get it right the first time, this is the one time we will read your proposal.

On rare occasions we may think your proposal is just too important to be thrown just for bad description/grammar/language, and we may contact you to refine.

  • The proposal must be as clear to us as for your target audience. Good proposals are easy to understand. Make it clear.

Being super-famous does not grant you immediate approval. It helps if you’ve given the talk 10 times in the past, and we’ve all seen it and it was widely acknowledged as one of the best talks ever. But then again, if that’s the kind of speaker you are, you probably know how to write a good proposal.

The committee seeks the audience’s best interest. We assume the audience’s common sense is similar, via extrapolation, to our own. We therefore assume that if we think a proposal is bad, so will the audience.

  • If you’re a commercial vendor and you want to make a proposal, that’s fine.
    • I suppose the best way would be through the sponsor program
    • But otherwise we actually accept talks on commercial/closed source solutions. Be advised, however, that the committee members will typically wish to promote open source & free solutions, and so commercial/closed source talks are at some disadvantage.
  • If you are owner/employee of commercial/closed source solution, and you’re going to speak on a subject that is related to your product, please be very explicit:
    • either note (in private notes, if you like) that you will be, say, comparing your own product along with other products, and provide full disclosure
    • or let us know you will in fact not speak about your own product, and make us sigh in relief.
    • In short, don’t let us suspect this is going to be a sales pitch in disguise. It is one of the quickest ways to get your proposal rejected.

You might be interested to learn that last year, a proposal made by an influential and a well known speaker was turned down for that exact reason. Even if he had no intention of doing a sales pitch, that’s what it looked like to us, and by extrapolation to the audience. Continue reading » “Percona Live: MySQL Conference & Expo 2014: call for papers & guidelines”

common_schema: speaking at Percona Live London, Nov. 2013

MySQL

In one week’s time I’ll be presenting common_schema: DBA’s framework for MySQL at Percona Live, London.

This talk introduces the rich toolset known as common_schema. It is free, open source, extremely useful in solving DBA & developer tasks, and is the next best thing ever invented next to SQL pie charts.

I’ll introduce:

  • Views, with which you can detect and terminate idle transactions, blocking transactions; roll your range partitions; find duplicate keys; block/unblock accounts; get fine grained privileges per account; find AUTO_ICNREMENT free space; …
  • Routines: do meta executions such as eval(); get query checksums; duplicating accounts; killing suspicious connections; security auditing; parsing JSON data; …
  • QueryScript: if you’re not using it, you’re missing on a powerful scripting language tightly integrated with SQL/MySQL. We’ll see the basic constructs, variables, loops; the more sophisticated MySQL/locks/overhead/danger aware constructs such as foreach & split; throttling, exceptions, it’s all in there. I’ll present real scripts that saved the day and challenge you to implement them in another scripting language.
  • Briefly introducing rdebug: stored routine debugger and debugging API
  • Roadmap (some cool things coming along) Continue reading » “common_schema: speaking at Percona Live London, Nov. 2013”

Percona Live 2013 keynotes: followup questions and discussion

MySQL

Here are a few questions remained open for me from Percona Live 2013 about things that have been said during keynotes; I will appreciate a discussion on comments. Here goes:

Question #1

Brian Aker (HP) asks Simone Brunozzi (Amazon) what the underlying technology for DynamoDB is. Simone says can’t disclose. Brian says: “it’s MySQL!!”. Simone says: “can’t disclose”. Brian insists: “it’s MySQL!!”

Seriously? I will be very much surprised to learn that DynamoDB uses MySQL; it doesn’t make sense to me. Why would Brian Aker say that though? Did he just mean to tease Simone or is there something I just don’t get? Continue reading » “Percona Live 2013 keynotes: followup questions and discussion”

common_schema booth on Percona Live 2013

MySQL
common_schema booth in Percona Live 2013
common_schema booth in Percona Live 2013 (someone left their soup on our table)
Allen Kinnard

Yay! I got a booth!

I confess it was mostly deserted. My hero Allen Kinnard, whom I’ve never met before, was kind enough to volunteer to occupy the booth.
So between him and me, both of course also looking to visit other booths and talk to people, the common_schema booth was only moderately attended.

Well, this was the DotOrg Pavilion: free booths for free & open source projects (e.g. OpenStack, PhpMyAdmin, etc.).
We both did our best to explain common_schema to the visitors.

The booth was actually titled “common_schema & openark-kit”. However I don’t recall that anyone asked me about openark-kit. Most were just interested in what common_schema was. I get that openark-kit is well known by now to many.

We did not have so many visitors, which played well with our occasional absence. But this was a last moment arrangement. In future events I may try to get things on top and have an army of volunteers to help me out (and I hope that by next time common_schema is widely used).

cookie_monster

Now for the criminal department: practically all other DotOrg booths came prepared, with printed material, giveaway stuff and the like. We were like way beyond “the minimalist”. We were “the poor and the pitiful”. So I asked Kortney if she could arrange me some decorations (pulling some strings – yeah!). We were thinking a bowl of candies or something. Eventually she brought a few dozen candies (no bowl) and laid them nicely on the table; very nice touch! Good mixture of colors, nice wave design.

And guess what? Visitors actually thought they may take one of our candies! Oh, I schooled them.
But on Wednesday, when we arrived to the booth, a horrid sight stroke us: someone stole (and probably ate) 80% of our candies!
Well, I hope you’ve got bellyache, and next time you should know there will be surveillance, candy-thief!

Slides from my talk: common_schema, DBA’s Framework for MySQL

MySQL

I’ve just uploaded the slides from my talk: common_schema: DBA’s framework for MySQL

My talk was well attended, and I was fortunate to have a warm and engaged audience. Thank you to all those who attended, and thank you for those who provided feedback! Was happy to be able to present my work a great group of people.

You can find my slide either on Percona Live’s website, or on Slideshare, as well as embedded right here.

I set two aims to my talk:

  1. To have the audience know how to download and install common_schema (Check!)
  2. Have everyone in the audience find one tool from common_schema that will make their day better. Quick raise of hands at the end of presentation: Check! All hands are up!

As I’ve noted following a question, rdebug is still in alpha. It modifies one’s routines in such way that does not alter the routine’s behavior, except:

  • Affecting the value returned by ROW_COUNT() (I have no immediate solution to that)
  • Also affecting result of LAST_INSERT_ID() (I expect to have this solved).

Thank you again; give common_schema a try. Best ways to support: submit bug reports, ideas, and above all: spread the word. common_schema for world domination!

common_schema 2.0: DBA's Framework for MySQL from Shlomi Noach

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!