Lenz Grimmer's blog

Reminder: OTN Sys Admin Day in Salt Lake City on January 18th

2012-01-05T10:24:45Z

Reposting of what I wrote on the Oracle Linux Blog:

Just a friendly reminder: this year too, we'll continue this series of free one-day events.

OTN Sys Admin Days are like OTN's Developer Days, but we focus on the Sys Admin with two parallel, hands-on Oracle Solaris and Oracle Linux tracks. These are live classroom events and you'll need to bring your own laptop to follow the practical exercises that we will go through in a VirtualBox environment.

The Linux track will cover topics like package management with RPM and yum, storage management with LVM2 and Linux RAID as well as learning the basics of managing the Btrfs file system. The Solaris track will cover the ZFS file system, Solaris containers and security (roles, SMF).

The next OTN Sys Admin Day will take place in Salt Lake City (UT), on January 18th, 8:00am-4:00pm.

Attendance is free, but a registration is required – reserve your spot now by following this link! We look forward to your participation.

Speaking about Linux at the DOAG Conference in Nuremberg next week

2011-11-11T15:34:08Z

It's conference time again – next week I'll be attending the DOAG Conference in Nuremberg, to speak about Oracle Linux and the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel on Tuesday, 12:00 and the OCFS2 cluster file system on Thursday, 13:00.

In addition to that, me and my colleague Manuel Hossfeld will host an Unconference Session about Oracle Linux and the UEK. The rest of the time I'll be manning a demo pod at our booth and try to attend some sessions myself – the conference program looks very promising!

Join us at the OTN Sys Admin Day for Oracle Linux and Solaris on Sep. 22nd, Seattle (WA)

2011-09-14T20:39:14Z

Last week we concluded our first Oracle Technology Network Sys Admin Day in Sacramento (CA). Well, it was actually the second Sys Admin Day, but the first one that had two parallel tracks of sessions about both Oracle Linux and Oracle Solaris.

I helped preparing for the event by creating the Linux lab handbook as well as the VirtualBox appliance of Oracle Linux 6.1 that was used for the exercises. Unfortunately I could not be there in person, but it would have been pointless for me to go on an intercontinental flight just for one day.

From the feedback we've received so far, the attendees really enjoyed the event and were positively surprised about the depth and quality of the practical hands-on lab sessions.

If you've missed the first one and happen to live somewhere in the Seattle area, you have another chance to attend OTN sysadmin day: we'll be hosting another one on Thursday, September 22nd at The Westin Seattle (1900 5th Ave., Seattle, WA 98101). Again, attendance is free, all you need to bring is your own laptop with VirtualBox installed. We'll provide the rest. Space is limited — you can review the agenda and register here!

What's coming up?

2011-09-02T12:07:00Z

In my last post, I provided a short review of what I have been working on in the past few months since I joined the Oracle Linux team. Now it's time for a summary of upcoming events! Looking forward, I already have a few more things lined up:

I'll attend and speak at the Oracle OpenWorld 2011 conference in San Francisco in October. I have a joint session with Chris Mason titled Overview: New Features in Oracle Linux 6 where we'll cover the latest developments. I have another joint presentation with my colleague Rob Young from the MySQL product management team titled Using MySQL with Other Oracle Products - this one will give an overview how MySQL has been integrated with the other products in the Oracle portfolio.

At OpenWorld, I'll also do some booth duty (find me at the Oracle Linux demo pods) and I'll also give a number of hands-on lab sessions:

For these labs, I created an Oracle Linux 6.1 VirtualBox appliance and wrote a 70+ page lab manual. I'll be around, aiding the attendees through these exercises.

By the way, a sneak preview of these hands-on labs will be available prior to OpenWorld as well: they are part of an upcoming series of the OTN sysadmin days, free one-day events that will provide practical workshops on both Oracle Solaris and Oracle Linux. We have three days scheduled so far - the first one of these will come up faily soon:

September 8th: Sacramento (CA)
September 22nd: Seattle (WA)
January 18th: Salt Lake City (UT) (no eVite page available yet)

On November 15-17, I'll be at the DOAG 2011 Konferenz + Ausstellung in Nuremberg, Germany. I'll give two presentations (in German):

I'll also hold an "Unconference" (or BOF) about Oracle Linux and the UEK together with Manuel Hossfeld, one of our Linux/OVM consultants.

And finally, I'll be giving a talk about "Oracle Linux and the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel: Status Update and Overview" at the UK Oracle User Group Conference 2011 in Birmingham (UK) on December 6.

If you happen to be at any of these events, please let me know if you'd like to meet!

What have I been up to lately?

2011-09-02T11:51:00Z

Despite my best intentions, I haven't posted on this blog for a while, which is a shame! I've become busy writing on so many other places since I moved into my new role in the Oracle Linux product management team in April. I've learned a lot and I am feeling quite at home here! The team is excellent and very nice to work with — I am slowly getting the "Big Picture".

But even though I've been neglecting this blog, there are a lot of things that are publicly visible and document some of my activites:

I've created two podcasts for the Oracle Linux podcasts:

In addition to working the @ORCL_Linux Twitter account and FaceBook page, I've been blogging on the Oracle Linux blog:

From time to time, I'm a guest blogger on the OTN Garage blog:

I also created new content and updated pages on the main Oracle web site and the Oracle Technology Network (OTN):

A new technical white paper about Oracle Linux and the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel
An article about How to Extract Files from an Oracle Linux RPM Package Without Installing the Package
Added a new page about our Oracle Linux support offering
Updated the OCFS2 product page
Updated the Oracle Linux technical information page.

I've been traveling a bit as well and attended a few conferences where I spoke about Oracle Linux (and MySQL):

MySQL High Availability at COLLABORATE 11, Orlando (FL), USA
An introduction to Oracle Linux at the HEPiX Spring 2011 Workshop, Darmstadt, Germany
What's new in MySQL 5.5 at LinuxTag 2011, Berlin Germany
Updates on Oracle Linux and Oracle VM at fisl12, Porto Alegre, Brazil

I probably forgot a few things in my reflection of the past few months, but these were some of the highlights.

Check out my followup blog post on what I'm up to in the coming weeks and months!

Back in Linux land

2011-06-16T07:46:19Z

It's been a while since my last post on this blog; I definitely need to get back into the habit! One of the reasons for my radio silence was that I switched roles here at Oracle. After having been with the MySQL team for 9 years, I felt it was time for a change. Fortunately I did not have to look far – I'm now a member of the Oracle Linux product management team and I am having a lot of fun there.

However, I realized that while I was an active Linux user on the desktop, quite a lot has happened on the enterprise and data center side of things. Linux has really come a long way and I am glad to be back in this field, drinking from the firehose and learning a lot about recent developments and technologies. For me, this is kind of going "back to my roots", as I have been deeply involved with Linux at SuSE before I joined MySQL in 2002.

Anyway, I'm still alive and you can expect to hear more about Linux and less about MySQL from me on this blog in the future. I also started writing for the official Oracle Linux Blog as well as the OTN Garage blog – watch these spaces for future posts from me, too.

In addition to that, my travel schedule is also filling up again: at the end of this month I'll be speaking at the fisl12 conference in Brasil and Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco later this year. I also submitted talk proposals to the DOAG conference and the UKOUG conference. Looking forward to it!

Oracle at LinuxTag 2011 in Berlin, Germany

2011-04-29T08:35:00Z

Linuxtag is likely one of the oldest and largest Linux/OSS events in Germany. I remember having been there to represent SuSE Linux while it still took place at the University of Kaiserslautern, using tables and chairs from the lecture rooms as exhibition stands (this must have been around 1998 or 1999). This year it will take place in Berlin again, and the session schedule looks very promising. I'll be there from Wednesday till Friday and I feel that I will have a hard time deciding which presentations I should attend...

I'll be speaking about What's new in MySQL 5.5 on Friday, 13th of May, at 15:00. If you haven't updated to MySQL 5.5 yet, stop by to hear what new features and improvements have been implemented in this version, which was released in December last year.

In addition to my presentation, there will be two more talks given by Oracle employees:

Wim Coekaerts, SVP of Linux and Virtualization Engineering at Oracle will give the first keynote on Wednesday 11th, 14:00. He'll be talking about Taking Linux into the Clouds — this is a very hot topic and I look forward to this session.

Right afterwards, Dalibor Topic will provide us with an OpenJDK Community Update. If you're a Java developer and you'd like to get the scoop of what's coming, this presentation is one you should not miss!

See you in Berlin!

Upcoming developer/sysadmin days about MySQL and Solaris

2011-04-28T15:50:07Z

The folks at OTN have been very busy — among many others (both virtual and in RL), there are two upcoming developer/sysadmin days about MySQL and Solaris. Both will take place in California next month:

On Tuesday, May 03, 2011, 8:00am to 4:00 pm, there will be the OTN Developer Day for MySQL in the Oracle Santa Clara Agnews Campus Auditorium. It will cover application development with MySQL, performance tuning tips and managing MySQL environments.
On Tuesday, May 17, 2011, 8:00 am to 4:00 pm, the OTN's first Sys Admin Day for Oracle Solaris will take place in the Hyatt Regency La Jolla at Aventine in San Diego, CA. Topics include ZFS, security and virtualization using Solaris zones.

Admissions to these events are free and space is limited — so make sure to register fast!

Abgesagt: Vortrag über MySQL Hochverfügbarkeit beim DOAG Regionaltreffen NRW am 23. Februar

2011-02-21T12:09:00Z

Update: Leider muß mich meinen Vortrag am Mittwoch aus Gesundheitsgründen absagen — ich bitte die dadurch entstehenden Unannehmlichkeiten zu entschuldigen.

Die Mitglieder der Deutschen ORACLE-Anwendergruppe e.V. (DOAG) organisieren sich auf regionaler Ebene in Regionalgruppen, die in regelmäßigen Abständen auch regionale Treffen organisieren.

Die Regionalgruppe NRW hat für Mittwoch in einer Woche (27.2., ab 17:30) ein Treffen zum Thema Hochverfügbarkeit anberaumt, auf dem ich einen Überblick zum Thema MySQL-Hochverfügbarkeit geben werde. Vor meinem Vortrag gibt es noch eine Präsentation über "Rolling Upgrade einer Oracle 11g Datenbank" von Rainer Klomps.

Veranstaltungsort ist das Hotel Kasserolle in Siegburg, die Teilnahme an diesem Treffen ist kostenlos. Eine Anmeldung ist erforderlich.

Announcing the FOSDEM MySQL & Friends DevRoom schedule

2011-02-02T11:49:13Z

It was ready for a while already, but now it's part of the official FOSDEM schedule as well: I am very pleased to announce the presentations and speakers of the MySQL & Friends Developer Room, which will take place this coming Saturday (5th of February) in Brussels, Belgium.

This year, our DevRoom will be located in room H.2213 (in the H Building), which has a capacity of up to 100 people and will be available to us from 13:00-19:00 o'clock. We have 12 sessions lined up, each will last 25 minutes (incl. Q&A). Without further ado, here's our schedule:

Time	Speaker	Session Title
13:00-13:25	Lenz Grimmer	Welcome note / What's new in MySQL 5.5
13:30-13:55	Oli Sennhauser	HandlerSocket and similar technologies - NoSQL for MySQL
14:00-14:25	Steve Hardy	Boosting Enterprise MySQL performance: implementing I/O prefetch for InnoDB
14:30-14:55	Istvan Podor	Over 20,000QPS, XtraDB performance show
15:00-15:25	Istvan Podor	Data Recovery for MySQL
15:30-15:55	Kenny Gryp	Taking Backups With XtraBackup
16:00-16:25	Sergey Petrunya	New query optimizer features in MariaDB
16:30-16:55	Lenz Grimmer	MySQL 5.5 Replication Enhancements: an overview
17:00-17:25	Giuseppe Maxia	Seamless MySQL replication failover with Tungsten
17:30-17:55	Petya Kohts	Multimaster MySQL failover
18:00-18:25	Seppo Jaakola	Multi-Master Replication Approaches
18:30-18:55	Stéphane Combaudon	A practical overview of Maatkit

I would like to thank all speakers for their submissions and for the efforts they are willing to go through in order to make it to this event! If you happen to be at FOSDEM this year, please stop by and join us.

We also plan to head out for a meetup over dinner after the event. If you would like to attend, please register, so we can take you into account! (Thanks a lot for Kenny Gryp for organizing this meetup)

One more week to submit talks for the Harmony conference in Helsinki, Finland (May 19/20)

2011-01-25T16:29:06Z

Just a quick reminder: the Oracle user groups of Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Russia are organizing a joint conference, the Harmony. It will take place on May 19th-20th in Helsinki, Finland. I've met the organizers at the IOUC summit that took place at the Oracle HQ this week and they would love to have some more MySQL content. So if you have an idea for a talk about a MySQL-related topic, please submit it! The call for papers closes on February, 1st!

Upcoming speaking engagements: SF MySQL Meetup, FOSDEM, GUUG FFG and COLLABORATE 11

2011-01-20T21:34:00Z

My calendar is filling up with speaking engagements about MySQL at various events quickly. Here is a list of events for the coming months where I'll be present:

On Wednesday, January 26th, I will be speaking about MySQL High Availability Solutions at the San Francisco MySQL Meetup. I feel honored for having been invited to speak there and I'm quite excited that venue is fully booked! I look forward to meeting so many MySQL users in one place.
On Saturday, February 5th, I'll be attending and speaking at the MySQL & Friends Developer Room at FOSDEM 2011 in Brussels, Belgium. I helped organizing the DevRoom and preparing the schedule for this event. We have a great lineup of speakers and topics, and I will speak about MySQL 5.5 there. I've been to FOSDEM many times before and it's one of the OSS conferences in Europe that I really enjoy coming back for every year.
On Thursday, March 24th I'll be in Weimar, Germany, attending the "GUUG-Frühjahrsfachgespräch 2011", a conference organized be the German Unix User Group (GUUG). The topic of my session is MySQL Replication Technologies - an Overview (in German). Erkan, well-known member of the German MySQL community will also be there to talk about "Toolbox MySQL", giving an introduction to the MySQL plugin API and technology.
Finally on April 10th-14th I will be in Orlando, Florida to attend and speak at COLLABORATE 11. Organized by the Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG), this is a fairly large conference covering a wide range of Oracle Applications and Technologies. This year, they have more than 50 sessions on MySQL, provided by both well-known speakers of the MySQL community as well as Oracle employees. The MySQL talks will be given in one track, which spans from Monday till Thursday. So at least one does not have to choose between several interesting MySQL topics at the same time

If you happen to be around at any of these events, please stop by!

I've also submitted a number of MySQL talks for LinuxTag, which will take place in Berlin, Germany on May 11th-14th. I hope that my proposals are being considered and I would like to encourage you to submit one, too! The call for papers is still open until January 25th and it would be great to have some more MySQL content in the program...

Oh, and don't forget to mark your calendars for MySQL Sunday at Oracle Openworld 2011 later this year (October 2nd-6th)! I unfortunately missed last year's event, but this is going to be the conference with the largest MySQL show, lots of news and updates, and plenty of opportunities for networking. You can already register for the event at a "Super Saver" discount until April, 1st here.

Bevorstehende Veranstaltungen mit MySQL-Relevanz in Deutschland und Umgebung

2011-01-20T00:19:00Z

Der Zeitplan des "MySQL & Friends" Developer Rooms auf der FOSDEM steht! Mein Dank gilt allen Vortragenden, die sich die Zeit genommen hatten, Vorschläge einzureichen. Letztendlich mußten wir eine Auswahl treffen, die Agenda ist nun auf dem MySQL Forge Wiki hinterlegt und wird auch in Kürze im offiziellen FOSDEM-Programm zu finden sein. Unter den Vortragenden sind viele bekannte Namen dabei und ich denke, wir haben ein sehr attraktives Programm zusammengestellt.

Gestern erhielt ich die Bestätigung, daß mein Vortragvorschlag für die GUUG Frühjahrsfachgespräche in Weimar im März angenommen wurde. Am Dienstag, den 24.3. um 11:30 werde ich einen Überblick über das Thema MySQL Replikationstechnologien geben. Im Slot davor wird Erkan einen Vortrag mit dem vielversprechenden Titel Baukasten MySQL halten. Ich freue mich schon sehr darauf! Auch der Rest des Vortragsprogramms sieht sehr interessant aus — ich habe viele mir bekannte Namen (besonders aus dem Sun-Umfeld) entdeckt.

Übrigens: der LinuxTag 2011 findet dieses Jahr vom 11.-14. Mai wieder in Berlin statt. Der Call for Papers geht noch bis 25. Januar. Ich habe ein paar Vortragsvorschläge zum Thema MySQL eingereicht, hoffentlich finden sie Zuspruch. Ich würde es auf jeden Fall begrüßen, wenn noch ein paar weitere MySQL-Vorträge von anderen dazukommen

Updated Drupal 7 appliances to version 7.0 final

2011-01-06T11:33:10Z

Congratulations to the Drupal community for getting version 7.0 released! This is a major mile stone and an excellent reason to celebrate!

If you want to give Drupal 7 a try without having to install anything, I've now updated my Drupal 7 appliances on SuSE Studio to the latest release. The appliance is based on openSUSE Linux 11.3 and is available in two variants:

A text-mode only appliance to which you connect using your local web browser via the network.
A GUI version that starts up the Firefox browser in a minimalistic GNOME desktop to perform the installation locally. Remote network access is available, too.

The database backend is MySQL 5.1, with the InnoDB plugin and strict mode enabled. phpMyAdmin has been added to support web-based administration of the MySQL server. You can access it via http://localhost/phpMyAdmin/. I also added drush, the Drupal command line shell and scripting interface and some additional packages (yast2-http-server, bind-utils, php5-ctype, patch). I also bumped up the appliance's version number to 7.0.0, to match the version number of Drupal included.

The appliance is available in various formats:

A live raw disk image, ready to be written to an USB stick or flash drive
A live ISO image, to be burned on a CD or used in a virtual machine
A hard disk image, to be dumped on a hard disk drive
Various virtual disk formats, e.g. OVF, VMWare/VirtualBox/KVM and Xen

Please see the installation instructions provided on the download pages for details on how to use the various image formats.

So congratulations to the Drupal developer community for reaching this goal and thanks to SuSE/Novell/Attachmate for providing the infrastructure for creating such appliances. I also would like to especially thank Richard Bos for the testing and many suggestions for improvement of these appliances!

Speaking about MySQL High Availability at the San Francisco MySQL Meetup Group (Jan 26th)

2011-01-04T15:51:00Z

I will be in the Bay Area at the end of this month, to attend a summit of the IOUC (International Oracle Users Group Community), to talk about MySQL and to meet with the organizers of Oracle User Groups worldwide. MySQL is a big topic for many members of their groups, I am looking forward to learn more about their activities and how we can better collaborate in the future. My recent experiences at the DOAG Conference in Nuremberg and the UKOUG Conference in Birmingham were quite positive — I was very pleased by the number of attendees at the MySQL sessions.

Since I'm so close to San Francisco, I gladly accepted the invitation to speak at the San Francisco MySQL Meetup Group on Wednesday, 26th of January. The topic of my talk will be "MySQL High Availability Solutions" where I will try to give a broad overview about the technologies and concepts involved.

Last time I checked, they already had 74 confirmations, the venue can host a maximum of 150 people. So if you'd like to attend and meet, hurry up and sign up soon!

MySQL 5.5: CMake replaces autoconf/automake on all platforms, support for autotools has now been removed

2010-12-15T17:58:48Z

There has been a lot of buzz about the MySQL 5.5 GA release and its new features and other user-visible improvements. In this blog post, I'd like to touch on a less noticeable, but still important change.

CMake has already been used to build the MySQL Server on Windows for a long time, while the GNU autotools were used on all other platforms. Since MySQL 5.5, all builds on all platforms are now performed using the same tool chain. With the latest release of MySQL 5.5, we've made an important step to clean up and simplify the MySQL build system: the support for autoconf/automake has now been removed completely. We've been performing the release builds of MySQL 5.5 using CMake exclusively for quite some time already. It became obvious that maintaining two separate build systems simply had become too much of a burden for our engineers, especially since the autotools-based builds were no longer exhaustively tested. This change was outlined in WorkLog#5665 - Removal of the autotools-based build system. We've made this step in close cooperation with our community of packagers (e.g. the maintainers of MySQL packages on the various Linux distributions).

By moving to CMake, we are giving our developers one common build mechanism for all platforms and there is a lot of new useful functionality such as out-of-source builds or a GUI for configuring the build options. And they can now build MySQL in the very same way that we do it for our own binaries! I've covered the advantages in my previous blog post about Building MySQL Server with CMake on Linux/Unix already. We've also created a general article about CMake and MySQL as well as an Autotools to CMake Transition Guide on the MySQL Forge Wiki. The description of the source build process in the reference manual has also been updated to reflect this change.

A big “thank you” should to go to Vladislav Vaintroub and Davi Arnaut for implementing and pushing the transition to CMake forward, and to Paul DuBois for creating and improving the documentation! Wearing my former build and release engineer hat, I am very happy about this change.

Other CMake-related articles that are worth reading:

Giuseppe Maxia: Building MySQL 5.5 with CMake
Jonathan Perkin: How To Build MySQL Releases
Santo Leto: Step by Step Guide on How to Compile MySQL 5.5 on Microsoft Windows

Erinnerung: CfP für den "MySQL & Friends" DevRoom auf der FOSDEM endet am 26. Dezember!

2010-12-17T11:17:25Z

Nur als kleine Erinnerung: bis Sonntag, 26. Dezember können noch Vortragsvorschläge für den "MySQL & Friends" Developer Room auf der FOSDEM in Brüssel abgeben werden. Die FOSDEM-Veranstalter stellen uns für diesen Zweck am Samstag, den 5. Februar von 13:00-17:00 den Raum H.2213 (100 Plätze) zur Verfügung. Wir haben schon eine Reihe interessanter Vorträge erhalten, würden uns aber noch auf weitere Zusendungen freuen! Jeder Vorschlag rund um das Thema MySQL ist willkommen. Pro Vortrag planen wir 20 Minuten Gesprächszeit plus 5 Minuten Diskussion ein, so daß wir insgesamt 12 Vorträge halten können.

Wir freuen uns über weitere Themenvorschläge oder auch Hinweise auf interessante Referenten, die wir noch ansprechen könnten! Vielen Dank.

Reminder: CfP for the "MySQL & Friends" Developer Room at FOSDEM 2011 closes Dec. 26th!

2010-12-09T11:25:06Z

Just as a friendly reminder about what I wrote a month ago: we've already received a number of great talk submissions for the MySQL & Friends Developer Room at FOSDEM 2011, thanks to everyone who contributed so far! However, we still are looking for some more!

You can submit your proposal via this form. The deadline for turning in your talk is Sunday, 26th of December, 2010.

Just to recapitulate, the DevRoom (H.2213) will be available to us on Saturday 5th 2011, from 13:00 till 19:00. Each session will last 20 minutes plus 5 minutes of Q&A. See this year's schedule for inspiration — I think we had a great lineup of talks that addressed a good mixture of MySQL-related topics. I am looking forward to your ideas and suggestions! Thanks in advance for your support.

Free MySQL event in São Paulo, Brasil (December 8th)

2010-12-03T14:57:54Z

As part of the upcoming Oracle OpenWorld/Java One in São Paulo, Brazil next week (which will also include MySQL-related sessions), there will be a free MySQL Community event, which will take place on December 8th, from 13:00-18:00.

Here's the (translated and abbreviated) description from the events page:

Oracle invites you to attend the MySQL Community Forum! Don't miss an evening filled with technical sessions led by engineers and leaders of the MySQL open source community. You will have the opportunity to learn more about MySQL, Glassfish and what innovations to expect from MySQL 5.5.
This free forum is open for members of the MySQL and Open Source community interested in knowing how small and large companies use MySQL and how they take advantage of our solutions. Choose from five highly technical sessions with well-known speakers, covering topics such as: MySQL Cluster, High Availability, Replication Tools, MySQL and GlassFish. See how Ricardo Eletro.com are using MySQL to achieve high levels of performance. Meet old friends and share your technical questions with the engineers of MySQL and Open Source community leaders. See how the GlassFish, NetBeans and MySQL work in perfect harmony. See what's new in the world of MySQL.

Sounds like a fun event to be at — if you're a MySQL user/enthusiast and you happen to be in the area, don't miss this! You can register for the event via phone or email to the contact information given on the page cited above.

This Wednesday: Free MySQL talks at the UKOUG Conference in Birmingham (UK)

2010-11-29T16:55:46Z

Hello from Birmingham, UK! I'm here to attend and speak at the UKOUG Technology & E-Business Suite 2010 conference (what a name!) We actually have two packed tracks of MySQL Sessions this Wednesday, including a keynote by Richard Mason (Vice President of MySQL Sales and Consulting at Oracle) about Oracle's strategy and plans for MySQL as well as highly technical sessions about MySQL High Availability, Scalability and Performance tuning from experts in the field. Ronald Bradford, Oracle Ace Director and long-time MySQL community advocate will also be there, speaking about Common MySQL Scalability Mistakes and MySQL idiosyncrasies that BITE. The latter talk is actually going against my own talk about "Making MySQL Administration a Breeze - A Look Into a MySQL DBA's Toolchest". This is going to be interesting!

If you happen to be nearby, don't hesitate to come over! Admission to the MySQL session stream and the exhibition area is free! The online registration has been closed in the meanwhile, but I just learned that you can just turn up on site and the conference team will accommodate you. See you on wednesday!

A quick summary of patch contributions included in MySQL 5.5

2010-11-29T18:23:00Z

I've been going through our bugs database to compile a list of some noteworthy patch contributions that have been included in the MySQL 5.5 release. Of course any contribution is appreciated, no matter how small! And the list is probably not complete — please let me know if I'm missing any. I omitted a number of smaller patches that fixed compile issues and I only considered contributions that were tracked in our bug database and were tagged as "Contribution".

Note that these are new patches that have not been part of any other MySQL release — of course, all contributions from previous releases are included in 5.5 as well. We also received a few patches for InnoDB (particularly by Mark Callaghan and his team mates at Google/Facebook), which were incorporated in the InnoDB plugin in MySQL 5.1 (and hence got included in the InnoDB version of MySQL 5.5, too).

Here they are, in no particular order:

BUG#13175: SHA2 function (Patch contributed by Bill Karwin)
BUG#14104: FLUSH LOGS now takes an optional log_type value so that FLUSH log_type LOGS can be used to flush only a specified log type. (Patch contributed by Eric Bergen)
BUG#27249: Aliases for wildcards (as in SELECT t.* AS 'alias' FROM t) are no longer accepted and result in an error. Previously, such aliases were ignored silently. (Patch contributed by Martin Friebe)
BUG#40368: mysqld_safe did not honor underscores in the same way as dashes for server options (Patch contributed by Erik Ljungstrom)
BUG#45767: Removal of Field::pack_key, Field::unpack_key, Field::pack_cmp storage engine functions (Patch contributed by Zardosht Kasheff)
BUG#50057: SHOW PROFILE CPU port for Windows (Patch contributed by Alex Budkovski)
BUG#5724: "mysqladmin password" prompts for a password when none is provided on the command line (Patch contributed by Harrison Fisk)
BUG#26780: A new mysql client option "--auto-vertical-output", which causes the client to test whether a result table is too wide for the current window (where available) and emit vertical results in that case. (Patch contributed by Eric Bergen)

A big "Thank you" to all the contributors!

Welcome to the MySQL Community Relations Team, Dave!

2010-11-15T23:51:10Z

It's finally official — please join me in welcoming my new/old colleague Dave Stokes, who just joined the MySQL Community Relations Team at Oracle as the new MySQL community manager for North America. Some of you may remember him from a previous stint at MySQL, where he was in charge of the MySQL certification program. Back then, he was already running the North Texas MySQL Users Group and a regular blogger on Planet MySQL. I am sure we will be seeing much more of these kind of activities from now on. So welcome aboard, Dave! I look forward to working with you.

Back from Lisbon, off to Nuremberg

2010-11-15T12:31:06Z

Yesterday afternoon I returned from the SAPO CodeBits 2010 conference, which took place in Lisbon, Portugal. Just like the previous year, CodeBits has been a great conference to be at and I am grateful for having been selected for participation. Thursday, the first conference day was quite a busy one for me — I gave two presentations in a row:

Afterwards, I also participated in a panel discussion about "To SQL or not to SQL", together with representatives from other open source databases (@fdmanana from CouchDB, @antirez from Redis and @bpedro for PostgreSQL). It was an interesting but somewhat slow discussion and the overall conclusion is still the same: there's more than one tool for a given job, choose carefully what your requirements are and don't just blindly believe the hype.

On Friday, I had some more time to attend other people's presentations. In the evening I took part in another panel discussion about Physical Computing. I also had the "opportunity" to try one of the Nuclear Tacos (Video) they served — I have never had something that hot before. Ouch! Fortunately my tastebuds recovered in time for the speaker's dinner, which took place later that evening. We went to a Rodizio restaurant nearby, the food was plenty and delicious!

Saturday was a pretty low activity day for me. I spent some time in the DIY corner, doing some Arduino hacking. Later that day I attended the project presentations and the closing keynote. Unfortunately a majority of the content was in Portuguese, so I only got parts of the content. But it was still fun! I've published my pictures of CodeBits on Flickr, I hope you enjoy them

Later today, I will be travelling to the DOAG Conference 2010 in Nuremberg, Germany. I'll be giving two talks (in German) there on Wednesday, 17th:

I already received my speaker badge for this conference (see the picture below). Cool idea: you can use the public transport facilities (Buses, Trams) for free, by presenting this card!

There will also be a MySQL Community Meetup on Tuesday, 19:00 at the Press Center of the Congress Center East. If you're around, you're more than welcome to join us there!

Next up in the conference schedule for this year is the UKOUG Conference in Birmingham, UK (Nov. 29th - Dec. 1st). We helped them with setting up a MySQL session stream, and they've created an interesting lineup of talks. I'll be speaking about Making MySQL Administration a Breeze - A Look Into a MySQL DBA's Toolchest. See you there!

Submitting MySQL talks to upcoming Oracle User Group Events in Europe

2010-11-08T12:16:17Z

I've been informed about two upcoming events/conferences that are organized by the independent Oracle user groups of the respective countries. If you're nearby, how about submitting a talk about a MySQL-related topic?

On March 29, 2011 the the Oracle Benelux User Group will have their yearly OBUG Benelux Connect 2011 conference, which will take place in Brussels, Belgium. You can submit your proposal until December 3rd, 2010 via this link.

On May 19th and 20th, 2011, the Oracle User Group Finland together with the Oracle User Groups of Estonia, Latvia and Russia will organize the EMEA Harmony 2011 Spring conference, which will take place in Helsinki, Finland. The Call for Papers has been opened — you can submit your speaking proposals until February 1st, 2011 via this submission form.

And while we're at it: the MySQL Developer room at FOSDEM 2011 in Brussels is still seeking for more talk proposals, too! Please consider submitting your suggested talk until Sunday, 26th of December, 2010

Weitere Seminare zum Thema MySQL-Hochverfügbarkeit im November

2010-11-08T11:50:07Z

Analog zu den vorherigen kostenlosen Seminaren zum Thema "MySQL Hochverfügbarkeit" im Oktober wird es auch in diesem Monat wieder zwei Termine geben:

Am 24. November in Hamburg

Am 25. November in Stuttgart

Behandelt werden unter anderem MySQL-Replikation, MySQL Cluster und ein Ausblick auf MySQL 5.5. Die Teilnahme ist kostenlos, eine frühzeitige Reservierung ist daher empfohlen. Weitere Informationen gibt es auf der Veranstaltungs-Seite.

Call for Papers: "MySQL and Friends" Developer Room at FOSDEM 2011 (Feb. 5th, Brussels, BE)

2010-11-01T22:25:10Z

It's that time of the year again — the nice folks at FOSDEM have granted us a developer room at their upcoming conference (February 5+6 2011 in Brussels, Belgium)!
As usual there were more applications than they were able to accommodate, so we are very grateful for this opportunity for collaboration. Titled "MySQL and Friends", our room next year will be H.2213 with a capacity of 100 seats. It will be at our disposal on Saturday 5th, from 13:00 till 19:00. Like last year, we would like to set up a schedule of talks related to the MySQL server and the various projects that surround it. Each talk will last 20 minutes, plus 5 minutes of Q&A and a 5 minute break for switching speakers, giving us 12 slots in total to fill with excellent tech talks. Take a look at this year's schedule for some examples! I hope we can assemble an even more exciting and interesting schedule for next year.
Quoting from my last year's call for papers:
We are looking for covering a wide range of topics that attract both MySQL DBAs as well as application developers that work with MySQL as their database of choice. Are you developing a new storage engine or other plugin? Do you want to share your experiences and best practices in administering or deploying MySQL servers? Did you develop a new method to scale a MySQL setup? Let us and the audience know about it! You can submit your talk proposal via this submission form.
The deadline for turning in your proposal is Sunday, 26th of December, 2010, after which there will be a voting and rating period to identify the most interesting and attractive topics.
Please check the FOSDEM 2011 information page on the MySQL Forge Wiki for more details and don't hesitate to contact me directly, if you have any questions or suggestions. I look forward to your proposals!

Vortragsvorschläge für den "MySQL and Friends" Developer Room auf der FOSDEM gesucht

2010-11-02T10:16:20Z

Am 5.+6. Februar 2011 findet in Brüssel die "Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting" (FOSDEM) - Konferenz statt. Auch im nächsten Jahr wird es wieder einen "Developer Room" zum Thema MySQL geben. Unter dem Motto "MySQL & Friends" möchten wir ein umfangreiches Programm an Vorträgen rund um den MySQL Server zusammenstellen, mit dem wir Entwickler und MySQL-Administratoren gleichermaßen ansprechen wollen.

Jeder Vortrag wird 20 Minuten dauern (plus 5 Minuten Q&A). Es sind insgesamt 12 Slots zu vergeben. Der Call for Papers ist bereits eröffnet - Vorschläge für Vorträge (in englischer Sprache) können bis Sonntag, 26. Dezember hier eingereicht werden.

Weitere Informationen gibt es auf dem MySQL Forge Wiki und dem englischen Call for Papers.

Ich freue mich auf Eure Themenvorschläge!

MySQL stream at the UKOUG Technology & E-Business Conference on Dec. 1st in Birmingham (UK)

2010-10-28T08:54:19Z

The UK Oracle User Group (UKOUG) is an independent non-profit organisation of users of Oracle products in the UK, which organizes over 80 events per year all across the UK and Ireland. They have more that 15.000 members and were established over 25 years ago. Currently, they are in the final stretch of the preparations for their annual Technology & E-Business Conference, which will take place from November, 29th - December, 1st in Birmingham (UK).

For the first time, the conference will host a dedicated stream of presentations related to MySQL, which is scheduled for Wednesday (Dec. 1st). Targeted at database administrators, developers as well as users new to MySQL, there will be presentations from well-known speakers and participants of the MySQL community as well as members of the MySQL Team at Oracle.

Attendees will learn about best practices and gain valuable insight into the MySQL Server and related applications and tools.

Highlights include a keynote about the Oracle strategy and plans for MySQL by Richard Mason, Vice President of MySQL Sales and Consulting at Oracle, talks about High Availability with MySQL and MySQL Cluster as well as InnoDB Performance Tuning best practices. Other sessions will cover related products and projects from the MySQL ecosystem, that help to make the most of MySQL. See the full agenda on the conference web site for details and speaker information.

Registration for the event is still open. Get your tickets now!

Drupal 7 test drive appliance updated to 7.0-beta2, now with GUI option

2010-10-25T20:18:01Z

Over the weekend I updated my Drupal 7 test appliance in SUSE Studio to the Drupal 7.0-beta2 release, which was released on Oct. 23rd. I also added phpMyAdmin upon a user request, to provide a web-based method to work with the MySQL instance, if needed.

In addition to the lightweight "headless" appliance (which can only be accessed and configured via a remote network connection), I've now also created a GUI-based version. This appliance starts a minimal GNOME desktop and a Mozilla Firefox browser, which in turn opens the Drupal installation page by default. I hope you will find this useful if you want to toy around and test Drupal 7 without having to go through the entire OS and LAMP stack configuration yourself. In fact, you can even test this appliance via the recently added test drive option from right out of your web browser!

The appliance is now also available in OVF format. SuSE Studio now also builds Amazon EC2 images, which don't seem to be available for download from the SUSE Gallery yet. I assume this is a recent addition to the continuously improving SUSE Studio functionality, hopefully these images will be made available soon.

Neu im Buchregal: "Open Source Projektmanagement"

2010-10-15T14:56:14Z

Heute hat mir der Postbote Post aus Österreich gebracht: Michael Prokop vom GRML-Projekt war so freundlich, mit ein Exemplar seines Buches "Open Source Projektmanagement" (Open Source Press) zu schicken, das im September dieses Jahres auf den Markt kam. Sogar mit Widmung - vielen Dank dafür!

Ich zitiere einfach mal aus der Beschreibung des Verlags:

Die Unterschiede bei der Entwicklung von Open-Source- und Closed-Source-Software gehen weit über Fragen der Lizenzierung hinaus. Wer ein freies Projekt startet, sollte die ganz eigenen Regeln kennen, um nicht Motivation und Arbeit aller Beteiligten zu gefährden. Das heißt zugleich: Wer die besondere Dynamik bei der Entwicklung freier Software zu nutzen weiß, wird von den technischen Ergebnissen und der besonderen Atmosphäre gemeinschaftlicher Arbeit immer begeistert.
Michael Prokop, Initiator und Leiter des erfolgreichen "Grml"-Projekts, schöpft aus der Erfahrung, wenn er die vielfältigen Aspekte freier und zugleich professioneller Entwicklungsarbeit beschreibt: soziale Belange der Teambildung und Motivation, technische Hilfsmittel der Kommunikation und Code-Entwicklung, aber auch ganz praktische Fragen der Finanzierung, des Marketings und der Dokumentation.

Wer neue Impulse für seine Mitarbeit bei freien Projekten sucht oder als Entwickler kommerzieller Produkte Einblick in den Open-Source-Kosmos nehmen möchte, findet in diesem Buch eine wertvolle Quelle.

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Unter der Adresse http://release-it.org/ findet sich die Website zum Buch. Das Inhaltsverzeichnis liest sich vielversprechend – ich hoffe ich habe bald Gelegenheit dazu, mir das Buch zu Gemüte zu führen.

Die Kapitel sind mit Berichten aus der Praxis und Exkursen externer Autoren angereichert und ich konnte einige bekannte Namen unter den Beteiligten ausmachen. Es war mir eine Freude und Ehre, zum Kapitel 4.1 "Team - Arbeitsformen in der Softwareentwicklung" einen Exkurs über das Arbeiten in einer virtuellen Firma am Beispiel von MySQL beisteuern zu dürfen. Zum Thema "Community Management" hat Alexandra Leisse von Nokia/Qt einen interessanten Exkurs geschrieben, dem ich voll und ganz zustimme