Lenz Grimmer's blog

Speaking at LinuxCon Europe 2012 in Barcelona (Nov. 5-9)

nospam@example.com (Lenz Grimmer) — Tue, 30 Oct 2012 01:05:00 +0100

I feel like I just got back home from Oracle OpenWorld (check out my pictures) and some vacation, but I'll be on the road again next week to attend LinuxCon Europe in Barcelona. I'll be there from Monday (Nov. 5th) until Wednesday evening. Oracle is sponsoring the event and we'll have a booth at the exhibition area (booth #19), handing out free Oracle Linux and Oracle VM DVDs. I'll be at the booth every now and then and plan to give a short introduction and live demo of Ksplice rebootless updates on Monday evening (6:00pm).

Two colleagues and myself will also give some presentations:

Status of Linux Tracing - Elena Zannoni, Oracle - Tue 6th, 14:20
OCFS2: Status and Overview - Lenz Grimmer, Oracle - Wed 7th, 10:40
MySQL Security Model and pluggable authentication - Kristofer Pettersson, Oracle - Wed 7th, 13:50

I look forward to meeting many people I still know from the SuSE days and to learn more about what's new in Linux - the schedule looks very promising and it will be a tough challenge to pick the right talks. And if you happen to be in Barcelona these days, I'd like to recommend two related events:

On Monday evening (Nov. 5th, 8:00pm), there will be a "Cluster / Storage / HA Geek Dinner" which I plan to attend. Please get in touch with Florian Haas directly for an invite to the Google+ Event. Thanks to Florian and Lars Marowsky-Brée for setting this up!
A week later, on Tuesday (Nov. 13th, 7:00pm), there will be a MySQL community event "State of the art in MySQL high availability and replication", including a presentation on the topic by Robert Hodges and Giuseppe Maxia from Continuent, followed by a networking event including beer and snacks.

I wish I could attend that second one as well, but I'll hopefully be back at home by then again...

UPDATE 2012-10-30: The direct link to Google+ Event did not work - Sorry for the inconvenience. Updated the RSVP instructions accordingly.

Upcoming speaking engagements: Oracle OpenWorld, DOAG Conference

nospam@example.com (Lenz Grimmer) — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 01:44:22 +0200

It's that time of the year again — the summer holidays are over and the conference season starts!

I'm very excited to be at Oracle Open World in San Francisco again, where I will pretty busy. On Saturday and Sunday I will attend MySQL Connect, primarily to man the Oracle Linux booth in the exhibition area. But I hope to catch some of the talks as well (I shared my favourite sessions with Keith Larson from the MySQL team in this interview). During Open World, I will help out manning the Oracle Linux demo pods in the exhibition grounds in Moscone South, where we will showcase Oracle Linux with Ksplice and related technologies. I also have a joint presentation with two of our customers about "Top Technical Tips for Automatic and Secure Oracle Linux Deployments" and I've prepared two hands-on lab sessions "Oracle Linux Storage Management with LVM and Device-Mapper" and "Oracle Linux Package Management: Configuring and Enabling Services". Both hands-on lab sessions will actually be run twice. The lab sessions were quite popular last year, I look forward to moderating these again.

In November, I'll be at the DOAG Conference in Nuremberg, to give a joint presentation with my colleague Manuel Hossfeld about "Oracle Linux - best practices and benefits" (in German). We also plan to request a slot for a BOF/Unconference about Linux, I'm curious about the feedback and discussions that will arise during these sessions.

If you happen to be around these conferences and would like to meet, please get in touch!

Domain name update

nospam@example.com (Lenz Grimmer) — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 17:33:55 +0200

It took me several attempts, but this blog is finally reachable via both http://www.lenzg.net/ and http://www.lenzg.org/ directly again. I had some trouble migrating the .org domain name to my new hosting company, but it's finally done. So now lenzg.org is no longer doing a http redirect, but will serve these pages directly!

Now I only need to get back to blogging more often here - a lot of my writing activity is currently done elsewhere...

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

nospam@example.com (Lenz Grimmer) — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 11:24:45 +0100

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

nospam@example.com (Lenz Grimmer) — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 16:34:08 +0100

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)

nospam@example.com (Lenz Grimmer) — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 22:39:14 +0200

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?

nospam@example.com (Lenz Grimmer) — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 14:07:00 +0200

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?

nospam@example.com (Lenz Grimmer) — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 13:51:00 +0200

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)

nospam@example.com (Lenz Grimmer) — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 16:38:00 +0200

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

nospam@example.com (Lenz Grimmer) — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 09:46:19 +0200

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

nospam@example.com (Lenz Grimmer) — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 10:35:00 +0200

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

nospam@example.com (Lenz Grimmer) — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 17:50:07 +0200

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

nospam@example.com (Lenz Grimmer) — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 13:09:00 +0100

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

nospam@example.com (Lenz Grimmer) — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 12:49:13 +0100

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)

nospam@example.com (Lenz Grimmer) — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 17:29:06 +0100

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!