Speaking at Percona Live 2013: common_schema, lightning talks

In two weeks time I will be giving these talks at Percona Live:

  • common_schema: DBA’s framework for MySQL: an introduction to common_schema, my evolving server side solutions project. This will be a revised version of the talk I gave at Percona Live London; I have felt some weaknesses during that talk, which I’ve thrown out, letting room for cool stuff. I will discuss common_schema‘s various views, interesting and useful routines, the power of QueryScript, and a brief intro to the newcomer rdebug, debugger and debugging API for MySQL. If you’re not familiar with common_schema, it’s a good time to pick up on what I (being most biased) consider to be your smart assistant to MySQL maintenance and administration!
  • The query which is the peak of my career: this is a 6 minute lightning talk. You’re bound to attend if you’re at the community reception (which you are), so I don’t need to do promotional. You already payed the ticket and the doors will be locked. No escapees.

As far as I’m concerned the conference can be closed down the moment I provide these two talks, and we can all go to the beach.

Wait, no, I will also be at the DotOrg Pavillion at the Exhibit Hall, where I present common_schema and openark-kit. Come by to hear more about these!

Percona Live 2013 schedule & events summary

Here’s the (hopefully) complete list of events throughout and following the upcoming Percona Live MySQL Conference & Expo, 2013.

The schedule is quite packed! Make sure to take a deep breath beforehand:

Monday, April 22

09:30 – 16:30: Tutorials

16:30 – 18:30: Welcome reception in Expo Hall

18:30 – 20:30: MySQL Community Reception by Oracle

Tuesday, April 23

09:00 – 11:00: Keynotes

11:00 – 17:40: Sessions

18:00 – 19:00: Birds of a Feather

19:00 – 22:00: Community dinner at Pedro’s

Wednesday, April 24

09:00 – 10:35: Keynotes

11:10 – 17:20: sessions

17:30 – 20:30: Community Networking Welcome Reception (in Expo Hall) MySQL Community Awards & Lightning Talks

Thursday, April 25

09:00 – 10:35: Keynotes

11:00 – 16:00: Sessions

16:00 – 16:45: Wrap-up

Following the conference, you can find:

Friday, April 26:

SkySQL and MariaDB’s 2nd Annual MySQL & Cloud Solutions Day

Assistance wanted: DotOrg Pavilion on Percona Live 2013

I’m looking for assistance in manning a DotOrg Pavilion on the upcoming Percona Live conference in Santa Clara.

As you may or may not know, free and open source projects are eligible to ask for a free booth on the Expo hall. This is a good chance to promote one’s project.

Of course, someone must stand behind the counter and answer [technical] questions.

I should like to have a booth for common_schema & openark-kit, but am limited in resources — namely the number of bodies I can occupy simultaneously, just one at this time. Along with some duties I have throughout the conference I do not expect to be able to be present for long periods behind the counter.

Are you familiar with common_schema/openark-kit? Would you like to lend a hand and contribute some hours at the conference?

For a full time attendee I can lend a hand and provide with a free conference pass + my gratitude.

Please comment below if you are willing to commit yourself to this task — thank you!

Speaking on the media: OurSQL, Reversim

I had the pleasure of speaking on two excellent podcasts:

OurSQL

No need for me to introduce this podcast. I just have to say it was only when I interviewed that I realized the amount of work taken for producing one single cast. Kudos to Sheeri & Gerry and Rich Goyette the sound producer and thank you for your kind hospitality!

You can find the cast on OurSQL Episode 129: New and Extended, where we speak about the upcoming Percona Live MySQL Conference & Expo, 2013.

Reversim

This is an Israeli, Hebrew speaking podcast, and is undoubtedly the queen of Software Development podcasts here. Run by two enthusiast, veteran, open source keen developers, this is a must hear podcast if your Hebrew isn’t rusty 😉 Thanks Ori & Ran for having me again!

I was honored to be interviewed for the 3rd time there, again speaking about MySQL and its ecosystem. In this recent podcast, I speak about the new 5.6 release, highlighting some features; about MariaDB; the Galera cluster technology; LGPL connectors; Percona Live 2013.

Find the cast on the reversim website: 171 MySQL 5.6

My next speaking event will be at the conference itself; more on that later.

Percona Live 2013 news: Oracle, BoF, Lightning Talks

Oracle

Oracle? Oracle! We’re extremely happy to have Oracle as presenter in Percona Live 2013!

You can expect three sessions by Oracle engineers:

MySQL 5.6: Performance Benchmarks, Tuning, and Best Practices – Dmitri Kravtchuk

MySQL 5.6: What’s New in InnoDB – Sunny Bains

MySQL 5.6: Redefining Replication – Luís Soares

And Tomas Ulin will present the obligatory “State of the Dolphin” keynote.

Skip my part in this conference for the moment; I’m very happy this is happening. For the community this is an obvious gain. I also wish to congratulate both Oracle and Percona for pulling this off; both parties deserve warm words here.

See announcement here.

BoF

Birds of a Feather schedule is published. This happens on Tuesday, second day of the conference and first day of conference sessions, 6:00pm to 7:00pm. The BoF sessions are reviewed by the conference committee.

Lightning Talks

Lightning talks are very short, rapid talks. We have 9 talks, totaling at about one hour. Giuseppe Maxia is orchestrating the talks. The talks are presented during the Community evening, Wednesday, 5:30pm to 8:30pm, where community awards are also presented. Giuseppe will naturally elaborate on that.

For me excitement is quickly building up!

Win a free Percona Live 2013 pass — unveiling riddle hints

Apparently my first attempt at rhyming proved to be unsuccessful: only two courageous men attempted solving the riddle. As I’m pretty sure a free pass would appeal to many, and I do have a few readers for my blog, I must conclude my riddle was just too hard. Obscure, perhaps.

Hope I didn’t scare anyone off. Without further ado I present some hints. This post will update with more hints as the day progresses — please refresh to see changes. I start with two hints.

But first, recap of the riddle:

Who will open your present,

Make you play pleasant,

Tidy your mess,

Do the same for all else?

It has something to do with the MySQL world. Continue reading » “Win a free Percona Live 2013 pass — unveiling riddle hints”

Sessions of interest in Percona Live 2013

Percona Live 2013 is shortly upon us, and it might be a good idea to watch for what’s ahead of us.

Talks of interest

There is no way I can do justice to all. I wish to point out a small number of sessions I am personally interested in attending. I will not be able to attend them all, since there are too many sessions of interest and too few instances of myself (merely one).

I’ve tried to list some talks which are not absolutely obvious (when Peter Zaitsev speaks of MySQL performance, or Monty speaks about MariaDB, or Robert Hodges or Domas speak about replication — well — you’re certain to have the ins and outs, right?). I can also expect Galera or Percona XtraDB Cluster talks to attract a lot of attention. There is a lot of good content for each.

But I was happy to find some very special talks this year, which are not the “every conference has got to have one talk about this” type. Here’s a hybrid collection of both types.

After constructing the list I’ve intentionally dropped two random sessions. If you are speaking, and not mentioned here, your talk must be one of those two! Continue reading » “Sessions of interest in Percona Live 2013”

Percona Live 2013 schedule released!

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: initial list of sessions

Committee‘s reviewing process for session proposals for Percona Live 2013 conference is now complete. It is now time for scheduling, checking, double checking, organizing, categorizing and publishing the session schedule. This will take some time. However, we’ve put together a list of 10 sessions already approved.

Now, just building a list of 10 sessions is quite the task: the sessions must be rated high, present a broad range of topics, target audience, speakers… This list is not necessarily “the top 10 sessions you will ever see in the conference”, but rather “a list of 10 great sessions you might want to see in the conference”.

After all, any single attendee cannot see all possible sessions; but we sure want the attendee to have a great selection of talks!

So, without further ado, here are 10 approved sessions for the Percona Live MySQL Conference & Expo 2013.