Lenz Grimmer's blog

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

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

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)

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?

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?

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!

Oracle at fisl12 (Porto Alegre, Brazil, 2011-06-29/2011-07-02)

fisl12 is likely the largest free and open source software event in Latin America. This year, it takes place in Porto Alegre, Brazil, from June 29th to July 2nd. Oracle is a gold sponsor of the event and I will attend it as a speaker. I feel honoured and excited to be there – for me it will be the first visit to the South American continent.

They already have over 3000 registered attendees, so this definitely is going to be a great conference. There is quite a number of well-known names on the speaker roster and I look forward to meeting a lot of familar faces there.

The agenda is still under development but quite impressive already – too bad I don't speak Portuguese...

I will be giving an introduction and status update to Oracle Linux and as our virtualization technologies Oracle VM and Oracle VM VirtualBox. Other Oracle speakers at fisl12 include:

Davi Arnaut - MySQL Engineering
Roger Brinkley - Java Evangelists and the Community Leader for the Mobile & Embedded Community
John Ceccarelli - Middleware Engineering
Anil Gaur - VP of Java Platform, Enterprise Edition, and GlassFish Server in the Fusion Middleware Group
Arun Gupta - Java EE and GlassFish evangelist
Luke Kowalski - VP in the corporate architecture group
Henrique Leandro - MySQL Support Engineer
Simon Ritter - Java Technology Evangelist
Dave Stokes - MySQL Community Manager
Dalibor Topic - Java F/OSS Ambassador

Back in Linux land

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

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

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

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

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)

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

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

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

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!