Lenz Grimmer's blog

Vorab ein Disclaimer: nein, ich bin nicht auf der Suche nach einen neuen Job

Ich habe auf der FrOSCon am letzten Wochenende Lukas Chaplin endlich mal persönlich getroffen, nachdem wir schon seit längerem in Online-Kontakt standen. Er betreibt das Job-Portal Linux Lancers (powered by MySQL), auf dem Stellenanzeigen mit dem Schwerpunkt auf Unix-, Linux- und Open Source-Jobs veröffentlicht werden. Dieses Jahr waren sie auf der FrOSCon als Gold-Sponsor und Aussteller vertreten und hatten wohl immer viel zu tun.

Ich finde diese Idee sehr gut – es zeigt, daß die Arbeit an und mit Open Source Software durchaus keine brotlose Kunst ist und Know-How in vielen Bereichen dringend gesucht wird. Mir ist bisher kein weiteres Portal mit diesem Fokus bekannt. Eine Suche nach "MySQL" liefert viele Hits, quer über die Republik verteilt. Kenntnisse und Erfahrung mit Opensource-Technologien zahlen sich aus! Die Website ist noch in einer frühen Betaphase, aber das machen die Inhalte wieder wett. Laut Lukas ist ein Relaunch des Portals in Arbeit, bei dem sowohl die Suchlogik als auch die Darstellung der Suchergebnisse überarbeitet wird.

Auf der amoocon 2010 in Rostock wurde ich von Ralf Spenneberg angesprochen, ob ich nicht Lust hätte, auf seiner OpenSource-Konferenz einen Vortrag zum Thema MySQL zu halten.

Die habe ich – am 23. September um 14:30 werde ich dort etwas zum Thema "MySQL Hochverfügbarkeit" erzählen. Der Vortrag soll einen Überblick darüber geben, mit welchen Mitteln und Methoden man einen MySQL-Server ausfallsicher machen kann und welche Aspekte dabei zu berücksichtigen sind.

Die OpenSource Trends Days erstrecken sich über zwei Tage; am ersten Tag gibt es Tutorien zu den Themen "Check-MK - Das Nagios-Über-Plugin" und "Kolab - Der Exchange-Killer". Am zweiten Tag gibt es neben meinem Vortrag noch Beiträge zu Postfix, Kolab, Fehlertoleranz mit KVM und XEN, OpenVPN und Nagios – ein vielversprechendes Programm von namhaften Experten auf diesen Gebieten.

Für Spenneberg-Bestandskunden ist die Teilnahme kostenlos, die reguläre Teilnahmegebühr ist mit 99 EUR pro Tag durchaus erschwinglich. Ich freue mich darauf!

With OpenSQL Camp and FrOSCon being over for almost a week now, it's time to come up with a short summary. I traveled home on Monday morning and then took Tuesday off, so I had some catching up to do...

As for the past years, FrOSCon rocked again! According to the closing keynote, they had around 1.500 (unique) visitors and I had a great time there. I really enjoyed meeting all the old and new faces of the various Open Source communities. The lineup of speakers was excellent, Jon "maddog" Hall's keynote about "Free and Open Source Software in the Developing World" was quite insightful and inspiring.

Most of the time I was busy with speaking at and running the OpenSQL Camp session track in room "HS6", but I managed to sneak out and listen to a few other talks as well. Additionally, I gave a presentation about ZFS on Linux, which had a good crowd and some interesting discussions.

This year, all of the sessions in the main lecture halls were streamed live, so people not able to attend could at least get a glimpse on what was going on these two days. Many times it was a really tough decision to make – there were way too many good sessions going in parallel. So being able to see the recording afterwards somewhat relieved that pain. The FrOSCon team has already begun to publish the video files – they are separated by day and lecture room and can be obtained from http://froscon.tv/.

And we were really lucky with the weather, too - the weekend was warm and sunny, a perfect setting for the social event, which is one of the highlights of FrOSCon. Impressive: this year, the attendees consumed one cubic meter (1000 liters) of Beer!

Finally, I'd like to express my special gratitude to all the speakers of OpenSQL Camp – thank you very much for your support and for devoting your time to participate in our subconference! It was appreciated.

Greetings from Sankt Augustin, Germany! I've arrived by train today and just returned from the FrOSCon venue, which will start tomorrow. The organizers are still busy with the preparations, but things already seem to be in good shape.

It was a mild and sunny evening today. Hopefully it will be the same tomorrow again, so we can enjoy a relaxed BBQ outside! The social event at FrOSCon is always a nice opportunity to meet and talk with fellow open source enthusiasts, users and developers.

And finally some good news for those of you who can't make it to FrOSCon this year: there will be live video streams from selected lecture rooms! So you will be able to attend the OpenSQL Camp sessions virtually - just head over to http://live.froscon.org/ and select room "HS6". It'll be interesting to see how this will work out.

Die DOAG ("Deutsche ORACLE Anwendergruppe e.V.") ist das Netzwerk der deutschen Oracle-Community mit über 3500 Mitgliedern. Im November dieses Jahres (vom 16.-18.) findet wieder die jährliche DOAG 2010 Konferenz in Nürnberg statt.

Diese Konferenz kann man mit Recht als eine Institution betrachten – sie findet dieses Jahr zum 22. Mal statt. Geboten werden mehr als 400 Vorträge von über 300 Sprechern. Zum ersten Mal wird es auf der diesjährigen Konferenz auch einen eigenen Stream zum Thema MySQL geben. Ich werde dabei sein und zwei Vorträge zum Thema MySQL-Replikationstechnologien sowie Werkzeuge zur MySQL-Administration geben.

Hier ist der aktuelle Stand der Vorträge im MySQL-Stream:

Dienstag, 2010-11-16

• 10:00-10:45: Keynote: Oracle strategy and plans for MySQL (Rich Mason)
• 11:00-11:45: MySQL Architekturen für Oracle DBA's (Oliver Sennhauser)
• 12:00-12:45: Stored procedures in MySQL (Konstantin Osipov)
• 13:00-13:45: MySQL Backup- und Recovery-Strategien (Matthias Jung)
• 15:00-15:45: MySQL Idiosyncrasies That Bite (Ronald Bradford)
• 16:00-16:45: Plugins: Die Vielfalt unterm Dach von MySQL (Erkan Yanar)

Mittwoch, 2010-11-17

• 09:00-09:45: MySQL professionell betreiben (Mario Beck)
• 10:00-10:45: PBXT: A Transactional Storage Engine for MySQL (Paul McCullagh)
• 12:00-12:45: Bereitstellung von Web-2.0-Anwendungen mit MySQL (Ralf Gebhardt)
• 13:00-13:45: MySQL Replikationstechnologien - eine Übersicht (Lenz Grimmer)
• 15:00-15:45: Blick in die Werkzeug-Kiste eines MySQL-DBAs (Lenz Grimmer)
• 16:00-16:45: MySQL Workbench für Einsteiger

Donnerstag, 2010-11-18

• 13:00-13:45: Aufbau eines Data Warehouse in einer MySQL / Oracle DB Landschaft (Nicola Marangoni)

The DOAG ("Deutsche ORACLE Anwendergruppe e.V.") is the German association of users of Oracle products. In November 2010 (16th-18th), they will hold their annual Oracle Users Conference 2010, which will take place in Nuremberg, Germany.

This event is quite an institution – it has been established more than 20 years ago already. This year, there will be more than 400 sessions by over 300 speakers. For the first time, this year's conference will also have a dedicated stream of sessions about MySQL and I'm happy to announce that I'll be there, too, giving an overview of the various MySQL Replication Technologies as well as a glimpse into a MySQL DBA's toolchest.

Here's the full list of MySQL sessions, as of today:

Tuesday 2010-11-16

• 10:00-10:45: Keynote: Oracle strategy and plans for MySQL (Rich Mason)
• 11:00-11:45: MySQL Architekturen für Oracle DBA's (Oliver Sennhauser)
• 12:00-12:45: Stored procedures in MySQL (Konstantin Osipov)
• 13:00-13:45: MySQL Backup- und Recovery-Strategien (Matthias Jung)
• 15:00-15:45: MySQL Idiosyncrasies That Bite (Ronald Bradford)
• 16:00-16:45: Plugins: Die Vielfalt unterm Dach von MySQL (Erkan Yanar)

Wednesday 2010-11-17

• 09:00-09:45: MySQL professionell betreiben (Mario Beck)
• 10:00-10:45: PBXT: A Transactional Storage Engine for MySQL (Paul McCullagh)
• 12:00-12:45: Bereitstellung von Web-2.0-Anwendungen mit MySQL (Ralf Gebhardt)
• 13:00-13:45: MySQL Replikationstechnologien - eine Übersicht (Lenz Grimmer)
• 15:00-15:45: Blick in die Werkzeug-Kiste eines MySQL-DBAs (Lenz Grimmer)
• 16:00-16:45: MySQL Workbench für Einsteiger

Thursday 2010-11-18

• 13:00-13:45: Aufbau eines Data Warehouse in einer MySQL / Oracle DB Landschaft (Nicola Marangoni)

In just two days the OpenSQL Camp Europe (hosted by the excellent FrOSCon) will kick off!

We've had a few last-minute changes to the schedule, as some speakers could not make it due to visa or family issues. But we managed to keep all slots filled on both days and I think we've come up with a very nice program! In addition to the two sessions I already had, I've volunteered to take over Giuseppe's talk about Shooting from the Hip. MySQL at the Command Line.

The most up-to-date version of the schedule is on the OpenSQL Camp Wiki, I expect the remaining changes to be reflected on the FrOSCon schedule during the day as well.

I would like to express my special gratitude to the folks at Percona, who really did their utmost in order to find replacement speakers for their accepted talks.

I look forward to this weekend. And if you're interested to attend: I still have a few vouchers for free admission to the conference left over. Please contact me directly if you'd like to get one – first come, first serve! See you on Saturday!

I just wanted to send out a friendly reminder: you still have time until next Monday, 16th of August, 8:00 am (UK) to submit MySQL-related talk proposals for the Conference Series Technology & E-Business Suite 2010 conference which will take place in Birmingham (Nov. 29th - Dec. 1st). The UK Oracle User Group is looking forward to set up a dedicated track with great talks about MySQL! Thank you.

Ich möchte nur kurz auf einige Konferenzen mit MySQL-Inhalten aufmerksam machen, die in der nächsten Zeit so anstehen:

Am nächsten Wochenende (21. und 22. August) findet in Sankt Augustin bei Bonn die Free and Open Source Software Conference (FrOSCon) statt. Auch in diesem Jahr wird es wieder einen von mir organisierten Track namens "OpenSQL Camp" geben. Es wird insgesamt 12 Vorträge rund um das Thema MySQL und andere Open-Source Datenbanken geben. Darüberhinaus haben die Veranstalter der FrOSCon einen dedizierten Track zum Thema "NoSQL Datenbanken" zusammengestellt. Es wird also reichlich Information zum Thema Datenbanken auf der FrOSCon geben!

Ich habe übrigens 10 Freikarten für die FrOSCon zu vergeben, die Teil unseres Sponsoring-Pakets sind (MySQL/Oracle ist Silber-Sponsor). Wer Interesse hat, sollte sich schnell bei mir per E-Mail melden – first come, first serve!

Das nächste OpenSQL Camp findet dann wieder in den USA statt, und zwar vom 15. bis 17. Oktober in Boston.

Davor gibt es noch einen Pflichttermin in den USA – die im September in San Francisco stattfindende Oracle OpenWorld, die dieses Mal gleich mehrere Konferenzen unter einem Dach anbietet: neben der "klassischen OpenWorld" wird es die Java One und Oracle Develop Entwicklerkonferenzen sowie den MySQL Sunday geben. Besonders letzterer verspricht interessant zu werden, es haben viele namhafte Speaker aus der MySQL-Community zugesagt.

Herbst und Winter ist traditionell Hochsaison was Konferenzen angeht, und auch dieses Jahr wird wieder einiges geboten. Seit der Übernahme von MySQL durch Oracle zeigen sich besonders die diversen Oracle-Anwendergruppen sehr stark daran interessiert, das Thema MySQL aufzugreifen. Nach der ODTUG Kaleidoscope, die im Juni/Juli in den USA stattfand, stehen nun die DOAG Konferenz in Nürnberg (16.-18. November) und die UKOUG Conference Series Technology & E-Business Suite 2010 in Birmingham (29. November - 1. Dezember) an, die ebenfalls dedizierte Vortragsreihen zum Thema MySQL anbieten werden. Achtung: für die Konferenz in England können noch bis kommenden Montag Vortragsvorschläge eingereicht werden! Wir freuen uns über jeden Beitrag.

I tend to switch between Linux and OpenSolaris as my desktop operating system from time to time. To be more flexible in this setup, I store most of my work-related data (e.g. source trees, VirtualBox images) on an external 320GB USB disk drive, using the ZFS file system. While OpenSolaris supports ZFS natively, I can access the file system on Linux using zfs-fuse and I could even mount these file systems on a FreeBSD system, if needed. There aren't that many file systems that allow an easy exchange of data between (Open)Solaris and Linux – the other ones that I am aware of are FAT and UFS, which both don't give me the confidence and flexibility I need.

A while ago, I purchased a second external drive of the same size and now use both of them in a mirrored configuration. This gives me several benefits:

• Redundancy: external disk drives have a higher risk of getting physically damaged, so having a mirrored copy of my data ensures that I won't lose anything important if one of the drives dies.
• Increased performance: ZFS is capable of distributing reads across both devices, thus I get twice the speed of a single USB 2.0 port, if I connect the drives to ports attached to separate USB host controllers.
• Automatic resyncing: When I'm on the road, I only take one half of the mirror with me. In case this drive gets lost/stolen, I still have a second copy of the data at home. ZFS complains about the pool being in degraded state, but continues to work normally. When I return home, I simply attach the second drive again and ZFS automatically resyncs (resilvers) anything that has been modified in the meanwhile.
• I can use snapshots for backup purposes. I have a small Intel Atom based PC (running OpenSolaris) that acts as my central file server (using two 1TB disks in a ZFS mirror) and CUPS print server. If I want to create a backup of my external USB disks, I create ZFS snapshots of the file systems in question and transfer these to the home server using "zfs send/receive". This works both locally by connecting the drives to the server box directly or via SSH over the network. I wrote a small shell script to automate this process. The transfer is done in an incremental fashion – only the differences between the current and the last snapshot are being propagated. To save disk space on the external drives, I usually discard all older snapshots except for the last one or two. On the file server, I maintain snapshots for a longer time period. The snapshots are named by using a simple date/time timestamp (filesystem@YYYY-MM-DD-HH:MM), this makes it easy to go back to a particular snapshot in case I'm looking for something I may have removed by accident, but I still recall when it was last used.

From my experience, ZFS is a very solid and reliable solution, providing impressive functionality with a very user-friendly UI (you only need use two commands, zfs and zpool).

If you want to learn more about ZFS and how to use it in practice, consider attending my upcoming talk (in German) about this subject at FrOSCon 2010 in Sankt Augustin, Germany!

Nachdem ich in meinem Blog bisher ausschließlich auf Englisch geschrieben habe, bin ich nun zu dem Entschluß gekommen, ab und zu auch mal Artikel und Kommentare zum Thema MySQL auf Deutsch zu verfassen. Wenn es in Zukunft also um Themen geht, die primär für Anwender aus dem deutschsprachigen Raum (der berühmten DACH-Region) interessant sind (z.B. Hinweise auf Veranstaltungen, Konferenzen oder Treffen von MySQL-Anwendergruppen), werde ich es in dieser Kategorie vermelden.

Der deutschsprachige Teil von Planet MySQL sucht auf jeden Fall noch weitere Autoren! Falls Ihr also noch deutschsprachige Blogger kennt, die ab und zu mal das Thema MySQL behandeln - hier kann man einen RSS Feed anmelden!

If you wonder why there hasn't been an update from me for quite a while — I just returned from two months of paternal leave, in which I actually managed to stay away from the PC most of the time. In the meanwhile, I've officially become an Oracle employee and there is a lot of administrative things to take care of... But it feels good to be back!

During my absence, Giuseppe and Felix kicked off the Call for Papers for this year's European OpenSQL Camp, which will again take place in parallel to FrOSCon in St. Augustin (Germany) on August 21st/22nd. We've received a number of great submissions, now we would like to ask our community about your favourites!

Basically it's "one vote per person per session" and you can cast your votes in two ways, either by twittering @opensqlcamp or via the opensqlcamp mailing list. The procedure is outlined in more detail on this wiki page.

As we need to finalize the schedule and inform the speakers, the voting period will close this coming Sunday, 18th of July. So don't hesitate, cast your votes now! Based on your feedback we will compile the session schedule for this year's camp. Thanks for your help!

Hello from Santa Clara, California! I've arrived here yesterday and am staying with Giuseppe and Jan in the same hotel. Currently, the weather isn't that nice and we're all busy making preparations for the upcoming MySQL conference next week.

I'm fiddling with my slide deck for my talk about "A look into a MySQL DBA's toolchest", realizing that there is such a wealth of great tools that it's unlikely to cover them all in a 45-minute session. But I hope it will give the audience some inspiration about what tools to take a closer look at!

On a related note, I've just reconfigured Planet MySQL to display 30 instead of 20 entries on the front page – I assume next week there will be slightly more postings than usual...

As I already wrote, I will be speaking at the MySQL Conference & Expo in Santa Clara in two weeks and I am excited to be there again. This year's conference is going to be interesting for a number of reasons, but most importantly I think that the schedule looks great! This is going to be a "drinking from the firehose of MySQL knowledge" event. Afterwards, I'll be on parental leave in May and June, so I likely will miss a lot of great conferences – these months are usually quite packed, as our Open Source Events Calendar can confirm. I just received a notice that my talk submission to OSCON has been rejected, which currently leaves me with two more speaking engagements in the upcoming weeks:

On April 24th, I'll be at the Grazer Linuxtage in Graz, Austria. The schedule has not been published yet, but I've been asked to give a keynote on the subject of working in a virtual company and a more technical session about MySQL HA solutions. Linuxtage is said to be the second largest Opensource event in Austria – they had 28 different sessions and around 450 visitors last year. I haven't been to an event in Austria for a while, so I look forward to being there!

Even though I'm technically on leave at that time, I will attend the amoocon in Rostock, Germany in June (4-6). While last year's focus at this event was on opensource telephony (Asterisk, VoIP et al), they decided to broaden the scope for this year's event: "It is a boutique conference where we create an environment to give every attendee a fair chance to actually speak to each speaker. So you can tank knowledge and new ideas without the bullshit-bingo." I really enjoyed my stay there last year and look forward to talking about "A look into a MySQL DBA's toolchest" (for those who won't make it to my talk about this at the MySQL conference) and "Why you should be using a DVCS". I noticed that Monty Widenius will be there as well, speaking about "MariaDB release 5.1 - What is it and what to expect from it." and "MySQL & MariaDB history". The organizers are also looking for a speaker from the PostgreSQL camp, so this is going to be an interesting event for me. In addition to that, Rostock is a pretty nice city and the baltic sea is nearby. The organizers have limited the number of attendees to 100 people and the ticket price is slowly increasing every second day – so make your reservations now!

Berkeley DB (BDB) is undoubtedly the workhorse among the opensource embedded database engines. It started as a university project in the mid-eighties and was further developed by Sleepycat Software, until it got acquired by Oracle in February 2006.

I had the impression that BDB had lost a lot of its popularity among opensource developers to SQLite in recent times, which has evolved into becoming the default choice for developers looking for an embedded data store. I'd assume primarily because the code is not released under any particular license, but put in the public domain (which makes it very attractive for embedding it into one's code), and also because it's lightweight, supports SQL and has interfaces to a number of languages.

Of course, SQLite has its limitations and use cases (as every product), so it may not be suited for some particular application. As the SQLite developers put it: "SQLite is not designed to replace Oracle. It is designed to replace fopen().".

Yesterday, Oracle announced a new version of BDB. One of the notable features of this release is the introduction of a new SQL API, based on SQLite. According to Gregory Burd, Product Manager for Berkeley DB at Oracle, they did so by including a version of SQLite which uses Berkeley DB for storage (replacing btree.c). I think this is a very smart move – instead of introducing a new API, developers can now easily switch to a different storage backend in case they are experiencing issues with the default SQLite implementation. So now MySQL isn't the only database with different storage backends anymore

I am curious to learn more about how the BDB implementation compares against the original (both feature- and performance-wise).

Oh, and this is actually not the first time someone put an SQL interface in front of Berkeley DB – BDB was the first transaction-safe storage engine that provided page-level locking for MySQL in version 3.23.15 (released in May 2000). The InnoDB storage engine was added some time afterwards (MySQL 3.23.34a, released in March 2001).