Lenz Grimmer's blog

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dienstag, 2010-11-16

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

Mittwoch, 2010-11-17

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

Donnerstag, 2010-11-18

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

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

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

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

Tuesday 2010-11-16

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

Wednesday 2010-11-17

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

Thursday 2010-11-18

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'm happy to announce that my talk "Making MySQL administration a breeze - a look into a MySQL DBA's toolchest" has been accepted for this year's edition of the MySQL Conference & Expo in Santa Clara, which will take place on April 12-15, 2010. The session is currently scheduled for Wednesday 14th, 10:50 in Ballroom E.

My plan is to provide an overview over the most popular utilities and applications that a MySQL DBA should be aware of to make his life easier. The focus will be on Linux/Unix applications available under opensource licenses that ease tasks related to user administration, setting up and administering replication setups, performing backups and security audits.

Of course I will cover the usual suspects (e.g. Maatkit), some of these are actually collections of different utilities by themselves. As it's impossible to go over each individual component in the given time frame, I will try to pick out the most popular/useful parts related to the scopes mentioned above. But I will also cover some lesser known gems that migh be worth taking a look at. What's your the most valued tool in your toolchest? I am still looking for more inspiration.

I look forward to being at the conference again and meeting with colleagues and friends in the MySQL community. Judging from the current schedule, it will be a very interesting mix of talks.

If you're interested in attending, you should consider registering soon! The early registration ends on March 15th. Until then, I encourage you to make use of this "Friend of Speaker" discount code (25% off): mys10fsp

Last week, my colleagues Giuseppe, Kai and myself attended the SAPO Codebits event in Lisbon, Portugal. Codebits is an annual, invite-only hacking event, which went on for three days. The venue they chose this year was the "Cordoaria", a former rope factory located in the Belém district, close to the 25 de Abril Bridge (which is an impressive sight!). I have been told that the Cordoaria is the longest building in Portugal and I have no doubts about that! The building is so long that the crew used bicycles to get from one end to the other. I've taken a number of pictures from the event as well as from Lisbon itself, you can find them in this flickr set.

The organizers described this year's event as follows:

3 days. 24 hours a day. 600 attendees. Talks. Workshops. Lots of food and beverages. 24 hour programming/hacking competition. Quizz Show. Rock Band Contest. Lots of gaming consoles. More food. More beverages. More coding. Sleeping areas. More fun. An unforgettable experience.

I wholeheartedly agree, we had a great time! The conference started with sessions and presentations on a wide range of topics on the first two days. Afterwards, a 24-hour programming contest was held. I was invited to give two talks, one being my all-time favourite about "MySQL High Availability solutions" (slides, video), the other one was titled "Why you should be using a distributed version control system (DVCS) for your project" (video, slides). Both went quite well and the feedback I received was pretty positive. Giuseppe talked about "MySQL Schema Migration" (slides, video) and gave an "Introduction to Gearman" (video). Kai's talk was titled "Think before you develop" (video) and gave a nice roundup of tips and best practices for setting up and developing new web projects.

The Codebits session schedule was filled with amazing and interesting talks in four parallel tracks. Sometimes it was hard to choose – some other talks I attended and enjoyed:

• Robert Nyman: JavaScript - From Birth To Closure (slides, video)
• Glenn Jones: Re-using social media data (slides)
• Brian LeRoux: PhoneGap: Mobile App Developer Zero to Hero (video)
• Brian LeRoux: The State of JavaScript on Mobile Devices
• Walter Belgers: Becoming a lockpicker

Walter gave a lockpicking workshop after his presentation, which I attended as well. I was quite impressed (and a bit shocked) to find out how easy many locks can be opened this way! Later that evening there even was a live band named "Pornophonique" playing (one guy with a guitar, the other one using an Nintendo Game Boy for making music), but I missed that show as I was too busy opening more locks... Fortunately the concert and most of the sessions were recorded on video (in excellent quality) and are already available from the SAPO video pages. Kudos for this speedy service!

But this just matches my overall conclusion of this event: very well organized, great speakers and venue. Thanks to the organizers for having us, we really enjoyed our stay!

This time of the year is usually a very busy one, as there are plenty of events and conferences to attend. Just take a look at our calendar of OSS events on the MySQL Forge to see what I mean! Here's a quick summary of the ones that I will attend and speak at until the end of this year:

On November 14-15, I'll attend the openSQL Camp in Portland (OR), USA. I missed the first one that took place in Charlottesville (VA) in 2008, but had a lot of fun organizing the European Edition earlier this year. The upcoming one will be more like an unconference again - the list of proposed sessions looks very interesting and the attendee list reads like a "who is who" list of the OSS database community.

On December 3-5, I'll be joining Giuseppe at SAPO Codebits in Lisbon, Portugal, which is going to be a very cool event: "3 days. 24 hours a day. 600 attendees. Talks. Workshops. Lots of food and beverages. 24 hour programming/hacking competition. Quizz Show. Rock Band Contest. Lots of gaming consoles. More food. More beverages. More coding. Sleeping areas. More fun. An unforgettable experience". I will be talking about my favorite topic of MySQL High Availability (I'm currently working on revising my slides based on several excellent discussions about MySQL HA that happened on Planet MySQL in the past weeks) and about the benefits (both social and technical) of using a distributed revision control system (DVCS) like bazaar, git or mercurial for your open source project.

Shortly after Codebits, I will attend SLAC 09, the "Secure Linux Administration Conference" in Berlin, Germany (December 10-11), where I will give two MySQL-related talks (in German) - my usual suspects, but in revised and extended form: MySQL High Availability solutions and MySQL Backup & Security best practices.

FOSDEM, the Free and Opensource Conference, will again take place in Brussels, Belgium on Saturday and Sunday (6th and 7th February, 2010). Now happening for the 10th time (congratulations!), it is one of the largest Open Source conferences in Europe, with a strong focus on developers. Sun/MySQL have been regular sponsors of and contributors to the event in the past and it is alway a great experience to be there. It's very rare to meet so many well-known and bright people from such a wide range of OSS projects.

They have now opened their Call for Participation - the organizers are seeking input on talks for the main conference tracks (deadline: 2009-11-22) , lightning talks (deadline 2009-12-28) and project stands (deadline: 2009-11-22).

As for the last conference, we plan to apply for a MySQL developer room (and maybe a project stand, anybody interested to join? Please contact me!). However, the web site currently states that they are "slightly reworking the concept of developer rooms", so it remains to be seen what this will turn into. In any case, we will set up our own call for papers, once the developer room allocations have been finalized (and we were lucky). I was initially thinking about running another OpenSQL Camp, but it's probably too short after the upcoming one in Portland...

If you have an interesting talk about a MySQL-related subject, consider submitting your proposal now! We will gladly review and comment on your proposal in advance, if you would like to get our input or need suggestions about topics! Thanks.