Tag: Speaking

Speaking in London: common_schema, DBA’s framework for MySQL

MySQL

I’m happy to be speaking about common_schema at Percona Live London, Dec 4th, 2012. This will be the first chance for me to speak about common_schema, what I believe to be an extremely useful companion to your MySQL server.

I will show you how common_schema can leverage your SQL skills and give you new powers. Stuff you had to be SQL-Perl-super-expert to work through is easily attainable with common_schema and QueryScript. Some maintenance, security and auditing tasks are now a breeze. Writing server side scripts can be fun!

What I won’t do:

  • Read the fancy manual aloud
  • Walk you through every possible view, column, function, parameter and script

What I will do:

  • Explain the nature of common_schema, show you the concepts behind it (and it is built with concepts in mind)
  • Provide with selected examples (schema analysis, security, processes & transactions) — there’s much to go by, but no boring drill down into all details.
  • Expose some cool hacks with QueryScript
  • Do very brief (as time allows) live demos.

common_schema is an open source project and released under the BSD license.

Last April Roland Bouman gave a great talk about common_schema. This will not be the same talk; a lot has been developed by this time.

I’ll be speaking at a very challenging time slot; the three other talks running concurrent to my own are all great ones; I actually wanted to attend all three of them. Heck, Peter wants to (though contrary to belief he can’t fork() himself). So, no hard feelings if you choose another talk during this time slot. But I do know where you live.

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!

Impressions from Percona Live, London

MySQL

Am now back from Percona Live, London. Here are some quick impressions of mine.

The physical location of the conference was excellent, not far from Tower Bridge. The conference area itself was nice and has good atmosphere. Very well organized. Kudos to Percona!

Theme

The official theme for the conference was “Discover the Power of MySQL”. However, looking back at the conference, I think the de-facto theme was “High Availability and Scale Out for MySQL”.

Why do I say that? Look at the sponsors of the event; look at the talks. There were talks by and about Clustrix, Tungsten (parallel replication), Schooner, Choosing a HA solution (by Henrik), Fusion-IO, MySQL Cluster, MySQL in the Cloud, Galera Replication, Scalebase, Spider, MHA, Various HA Solutions (by Oli Sennhauser)…

There were other talks, about all sorts of things. But to me it seemed like scale-out was the big thing, and HA the next one. Especially looking at sponsors booths it looked that way.

People

Of course, it’s no secret that meeting the people is a great fun. I met with familiar faces, and was happy to meet new ones. It’s great to just discuss stuff with people, share opinions.

The after party was fun, and well organized. Kudos to Clustrix who sponsored it!

Business talk

I wasn’t at the conference to sell anything myself, and so was on a relaxed mood. I was happy that whatever sales talk I shared, heard or overheard was highly technical and very open. It was also good to openly discuss possible relationships.

I was in particular pleased to see the popularity some of my tools and ideas were gaining. I could recognize at least two talks where my tools were mentioned; I was delighted to talk to DBAs telling me they were using openark-kit in general, oak-online-alter-table in particular, or some SQL solutions and tricks I offered in my blog. This is really wonderful! To write something having people use it to their benefit — I suppose this is what open source aspires to. It’s great to hear feedback, and better yet to get good feedback.

I also had the pleasure of meeting people after hours, and have good discussions, not necessarily MySQL related.

To top it all, I had free time on Wednesday, where I had a superior visit to the Natural History Museum, which left me in awe.

Slides from my talk: “Programmatic Queries: things you can code with SQL”

MySQL

Here are the slides from my talk Programmatic Queries: things you can code with SQL held on October 25th on the Percona Live event, London.

Programmatic Queries: PDF

I wish to thank those who attended my talk.

The topic of the talk was irregular and, to some extent, controversial. Should one really rely on internal implementation for optimizing her queries? Sergei Golubchik was quick to suggest that even in current and coming versions of MariaDB, some things I spoke about may not hold true. I accept.

I was in urge to complete my talk within the time frame. I was happy to hear later on that my talk was well received.

There were homework to my talk. I thought I would make some contest picking the best answers, stay tuned.

Speaking on Percona Live, London: “Programmatic Queries: things you can code with SQL”

MySQL

I’ll be speaking at the Percona Live event, held in London, October 24, 25, 2011.

My session is called Programmatic Queries: things you can code with SQL. It’s a short 30 minute talk, in which I present underlying knowledge of the programmatic nature of SQL queries within MySQL, and how to take advantage of such knowledge so as to build faster, shorter, and sometimes unexpected queries.

This is not about stored routine programming, a classic programmatic aspect of MySQL, but rather about expected order of execution: of row evaluation, of control flow statements, of table inference, of time issues.

I have far too many examples, some real-world problem solvers, and some less common in daily use, to be able to deliver them all on this session. I will pick up those which seem most interesting to me, or those best presenting the programmatic nature of the query. As time allows I may add more examples, or look into interesting future possibilities.

I hope to see you there.