Lenz Grimmer's blog

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!

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!

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!

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.

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.

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

The Drupal community just recently released another alpha test release of their upcoming Drupal 7 version, to shake out the remaining bugs and to encourage more users to test it.

If you would like to give it a try, but you don't have a free server handy, how about using a virtual machine instead? Using the fabolous SuSE Studio, I've created an appliance based on openSUSE 11.3, Drupal 7.0-alpha7 and MySQL 5.1 with the InnoDB plugin and strict mode enabled (both for the SQL mode and InnoDB mode. Using this configuration helps to ensure that Drupal works well with the current version of MySQL/InnoDB and does not use any "questionable" SQL statements. This might be especially interesting for additional modules - Drupal core did not reveal any problems using strict mode so far.

You can download disk images for VMware/Virtualbox/KVM or XEN from the SUSE Gallery (free login required). Just boot the appliance in your virtualization application of choice, choose your keyboard layout and step through the network configuration and Time Zone selection. Once the appliance has booted up and the login: prompt appeared, point your web browser to the appliance's IP address to start the Drupal installation/configuration. MySQL has been pre-configured, there is an empty database named "drupal" and a user "drupal" with the same password to access it. You just need to enter this information in the Drupal Database configuration dialogue during the installation. Anything else can be configured to your liking.

After you have finished the installation, you can toy around with a fresh Drupal 7 installation! Install additional modules, change the themes, add content. And make sure to report all bugs that you run into while doing so! Have fun.

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.