Speaking at Percona Live Dublin: keynote, orchestrator tutorial, MySQL testing automation

I’m looking forward to a busy Percona Live Dublin conference, delivering three talks. Chronologically, these are:

  • Practical orchestrator tutorial
    Attend this 3 hour tutorial for a thorough overview on orchestrator: what, why, how to configure, best advice, deployments, failovers, security, high availability, common operations, …
    We will of course discuss the new orchestrator/raft setup and share our experience running it in production.
    The tutorial will allow for general questions from the audience and open discussions.
  • Why Open Sourcing Our Database Tooling was the Smart Decision
    What it says. A 10 minute journey advocating for open sourcing infrastructure.
  • MySQL Infrastructure Testing Automation at GitHub
    Co-presenting with Tom Krouper, we share how & why we run infrastructure tests in and near production that gives us trust in many of our ongoing, ever changing operations. Essentially this is “why you should feel OK trusting us with your data”.

See you there!

Speaking at August Penguin, MySQL Track, GitHub sponsored

This Thursday I’ll be presenting at August Penguin, conveniently taking place September 7th, 8th, Ramat Gan, Israel.

I will be speaking as part of the MySQL track, 2nd half of Thursday. The (Hebrew) schedule is here.

My talk is titled Reliable failovers, safe schema migrations: open source solutions to MySQL problems. I will describe some of the open source MySQL infrastructure work we run at GitHub ; how it solves reliability, availability and usability. I’ll describe some of our internal workflows and our use of chat and chatops.

I’m proud to announce GitHub sponsors the event. We won’t have a booth, but please do grab me in the hallways or over lunch to chat!

And, yes, octocat stickers will be made available 🙂

 

Speaking at FOSDEM: Pseudo GTID and easy replication management

This coming Sunday I’ll be presenting Pseudo GTID and easy replication management at FOSDEM, Brussels.

There’s been a lot of development on Pseudo GTID these last few weeks. In this talk I’ll show you how you can use Pseudo GTID instead of “normal” GTID to easily repoint your slaves, recover from intermediate master failure, promote slaves to masters as well as emply crash safe replication without crash safe replication.

Moreover, I will show how you can achieve all the above with less constraints than GTID, and for bulk operations — with less overhead and in shorter time. You will also see that Pseudo GTID is a non intrusive solution which does not require you to change anything in your topologies.

Moral: I’ll try and convince you to drop your plans for using GTID in favor of Pseudo GTID.

We will be employing Pseudo GTID as the basis for high availability and failover at Booking.com on many topologies, and as a safety mechanism in other topologies where we will employ Binlog servers.

Pseudo gtid & easy replication topology management from Shlomi Noach

Percona Live 2015: Call for Papers is open

And not for long!

The Call for Papers for Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo, to be held at Santa Clara in April 2015, is open. The dead line for submissions is Nov. 16th; that’s just around the corner.

As with previous years, we will hold a 4 day conference, the first being a tutorials day and three days for sessions, BoF and lightning talks, as well as community events. The committee is expecting to review at about 250-300 submissions, out of which it will pick at about 100 talks to schedule or reserve.

We will be using these tracks:

  • High Availability
  • DevOps
  • Programming
  • Performance Optimization
  • Replication and Backup
  • MySQL in the Cloud
  • MySQL and NoSQL
  • MySQL Case Studies
  • Security
  • What’s New in MySQL

This year we will roughly pre-define the desired number of sessions we wish to have per track. This is not set in stone and everything is fluid. Yet, this will give us better guidelines at choosing and pursuing content for this conference.

Submitting a proposal

We encourage all members of the community to submit their tutorial/session/BoF proposals as soon as possible. Please register/login at the conference home page.

The guidelines for submitting a proposal are generally unchanged; please review past recommendations: [1], [2], [3], [4]. To add to all these:

  • Do note that we are likely to only review a proposal just once. Please submit only after you have finalized your draft.
  • Make a reasonable length of proposal. We believe 250 – 300 words are quite enough for a good proposal. Please don’t write an essay, and remember that you proposal is what gets printed on the schedule, and what is read by the conference attendees when choosing the next talk to go to.
  • Write a descent Bio.

Continue reading » “Percona Live 2015: Call for Papers is open”

Speaking at Percona Live: common_schema, MySQL DevOps

In less than a month I’ll be giving these two talks at Percona Live:

If you are still unfamiliar with common_schema, this will make for a good introduction. I’ll give you multiple reasons why you would want to use it, and how it would come to immediate use at your company. I do mean immediate, as in previous common_schema presentations I happened to get feedback emails from attendees within the same or next day letting me know how common_schema solved an insistent problem of theirs or how it exposed an unknown status.

I’ll review some useful views & routines, and discuss the ease and power of QueryScript. common_schema is a Swiss-knife of solutions, and all from within your MySQL server.

I am using common_schema in production on a regular basis, and it happened to be hero of the day in multiple occasions. I’ll present a couple such cases.

common_schema 2.2: DBA's framework for MySQL (April 2014) from Shlomi Noach

This is a technical talk touching at some cultural issues.

At Outbrain, where I work, we have two blessings: a large group of engineers and a large dataset. We at the infrastructure team, together with the ops team, are responsible for the availability of the data. What we really like is technology which lets the owners of a problem be able to recognize it and take care of it. We want ops guys to do ops, and engineers to do engineering. And we want them to be able to talk to each other and understand each other.

What tools can you use to increase visibility? To allow sharing of data between the teams? I’ll share some tools and techniques that allow us to automate deployments, detect a malfunctioning/abusing service, deploy schema changes across dozens of hosts, control data retention, monitor connections, and more.

We like open source. The tools discussed are mostly open source, or open sourced by Outbrain.

I’ll explain why these tools matter, and how they serve the purpose of removing friction between teams, allowing for quick analysis of problems and overall visibility on all things that happen.

MySQL DevOps at Outbrain from Shlomi Noach

Do come by!

Percona Live – call for “Hall of Shame” talks

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.

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

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:

common_schema: speaking at Percona Live London, Nov. 2013

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”

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

#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!

 

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.