Lenz Grimmer's blog

I'm happy to announce that the schedule for OpenSQL Camp 2009 (European Edition) has been published on the FrOSCon timetable now. We have a great selection of topics and speakers, so don't miss it! OpenSQL Camp is a subconference of FrOSCon, the Free and Open Source Conference, which will take place on August 22nd and 23rd in St. Augustin, Germany.

The admission fee for the entire conference (both days, incl. OpenSQL Camp) is 5 EUR, you can pre-register here until August 10th (and if you do so today, you will still get a free T-Shirt as well!). Of course, you can also just show up at the entrance and pay the entrance fee on site. The OpenSQL Camp will be located in Room C120 - see the instructions on the FrOSCon web page on how to get there and where to find accommodation.

In case you can't make it to Germany for the European Edition, Eric Day and Selena Deckelmann have started to organize another OpenSQL Camp in Portland, Oregon which will take place on November 14th and 15th. More details can be found on the OpenSQL Camp Wiki. Space is limited to 120 attendees, so sign up today and reserve your spot!

The Call for Papers for the OpenSQL Camp 2009 (European Edition) has ended yesterday — we received 27 excellent session proposals from various Open Source Database projects. I would like to say a big "Thank You" to everyone who submitted a talk! In the beginning I was a bit concerned that the conference would become too MySQL-centric, but this fortunately changed in the last few days.

Sadly we now have more than double the amount of sessions than we can actually host, which means that we will have to review and vote on the sessions to distill the final program. We've formed a small committee that will perform this task (currently consisting of Sheeri, Giuseppe and myself) and is in charge of finalizing the schedule. But you can help us with this! We are seeking your input on which sessions you would like to attend until Sunday, July 26th (12:00pm PST).

The system basically asks for "one vote per person per session", giving you a chance to influence the program yourself: you can cast one vote for each session by either stating you would be interested in attending it (+1) or not interested (-1). Additionally, you can add a comment for each vote to provide a reasoning for your choice. Ideally, you should of course plan to actually attend our event, but you are welcome to tell us what you would have been interested in, in case you can't make it to the Camp. See the OpenSQL Camp wiki page for more details and instructions. You can submit your votes via Twitter or the OpenSQL Camp mailing list.

We look forward to your input!

I've now posted all the current talk submissions to the OpenSQL Camp Wiki. A big Thank You to everyone who contributed so far and helped us to bang the drum for this event! If you haven't heard about OpenSQL Camp yet, it's a subconference of the Free and Open Source Conference (FrOSCon) in St. Augustin, Germany, which takes place on August 22+23. The topic of OpenSQL Camp is "Open Source databases and related technologies" and we're looking for interesting presentations in this field.

As we have 12 session slots to fill, we still have room for at least 6 more submissions! It's also a tad bit MySQL-centric at the moment, that should definitely change! We would love to get some more diversity to cover a broader range of Open Source Database technology.

So please submit your talk proposals and help spreading the word — the Call for Papers is still open until July, 19th! Post a message to relevant discussion forums and mailing lists. Know an expert in this field? Approach him directly! OpenSQL Camp Speakers will receive free entry to FrOSCon, which is worth visiting in any case!

Oracle/InnoBase announced the availability of the embedded version of InnoDB at this year's MySQL Conference & Expo, but I have not seen a lot of comments or reviews about it so far. Which surprises me, because I think this is a very interesting piece of technology!

In my opinion it might actually hit the sweet spot for application developers seeking an alternative embedded database solution. SQLite is nice and popular, but it seems to have concurrency issues when used in multi-threaded applications. An embedded MySQL server would be an alternative - this is what the Amarok developers decided to go with, for example. But this approach has its issues, too, especially the lack of a shared library version of libmysqld poses some challenges when distributing binaries.

This is where I think the embedded version of InnoDB might have an edge. It's pretty lightweight in comparison to a full-blown MySQL server, provides excellent crash-recovery (which is essential for desktop applications), transactions (useful in environments with high concurrency) and foreign key constraints. I'm not sure how important these are for embedded use cases, it probably depends on the complexity of the data to be stored. On the downside, Embedded InnoDB does not "speak" SQL. In order to store and retrieve values, you need to use the InnoDB API. See the chapter Concepts and Architecture for more details and an overview.

Another possible reason for the low popularity might be that it's currently not part of any Linux distribution (yet) and that Oracle only provides binary tarball packages for Linux and a Windows binary for download from the web site.

Therefore I've now created a spec file to build RPMs of Embedded InnoDB and added it to my repository on the openSUSE Build Service, which now provides Embedded InnoDB packages for a wide range of RPM-based Linux distributions. I hope that the spec file will be included in the next source distribution. I've posted it (and a patch to fix a few problems with the examples) to the newly created InnoDB mailing list, but to be sure I added a note to the Embedded InnoDB Forum as well.

XtraBackup is an Open Source online (non-blockable) backup solution for the InnoDB and XtraDB storage engines. It works with both MySQL 5.0 and 5.1 (and possibly 5.4 as well) and is distributed under the GPLv2.

Some weeks ago Vadim announced the availability of xtrabackup-0.7, stating that they consider it stable enough now to label this version a "Release Candidate". I've been maintaining RPM packages of xtrabackup on the fine openSUSE Build Service for quite some time now, RPMs of 0.7 for a number of distributions are now available for download. Please report any bug reports via the bug tracker on Launchpad.

The OpenSQL Camp 2009 web site is now ready for business, I've updated various pages and added some more information about the call for papers. I've also set up a Twitter account (no way without one nowadays, right?), which might also play an important role in the voting/rating of talks later on (Giuseppe came up with an interesting proposal for that).

So we're now seeking your input! Let me quote from the web pages directly:

OpenSQL Camp is a free conference of, by, and for the open-source database community of users and developers. The first OpenSQLCamp 2008 took place in Charlottesville, Virginia, USA, November 14, 15, and 16 2008.

The OpenSQLCamp 2009, European Edition will take part in parallel to the Free and Open Source Conference 2009 (FrOSCon) on Saturday 22nd and Sunday 23rd August in St. Augustin, Germany. St. Augustin is located close to Bonn and Cologne.

Attendees of this conference are mostly open source developers and end users/open source enthusiasts. The FrOSCon organizers agreed to provide us with a "Developer Room" for both days, which allows us to organize our own subconference about Open Source Databases and related technologies. The goal of this event is to spread the word about the vibrant communities and large ecosystems around Open Source Databases and to educate the attendees about what alternatives exist to commercial databases. It is a place where people come to learn, to participate and to contribute. In other words, it's a great conference, and if you attend, it will be better.

We are seeking talks related to Open Source Databases of all kind, not just relational databases! Submission about tools and technologies related to OSS databases (e.g. connectors/APIs) are also welcome.

Submitting your proposals

We will use FrOSCon's Pentabarf conference coordination system to collect talk submissions and perform the organizing and scheduling of the talks. Please create an account there, if you don't have one already. Once you have activated your account via the email address you provided, please log into the system and create a new event. Make sure to select track OpenSQLCamp for your submission!

The deadline for submitting your proposal is Sunday, July 19th, 2009!

We will try to synchronize our schedule and speaking slots with the main conference program, to allow easy switching between sessions in the Developer Rooms and the main conference. So your talk should be put into the "Lecture" format and will last one hour (incl. Q&A).

We will try to perform the review and voting about the sessions in public, so the community and potential audience will have a say about which sessions they want to listen to. The details of how this will be done are still under discussion.

A number of database-related talks have already been submitted to the general FrOSCon program. The FrOSCon organizers will evaluate if some of these talks would be more suitable for the OpenSQLCamp track, but stated that they would be interested to keep some of the submitted sessions as part of the main conference program.

Some ideas and suggestions for submissions

• An introduction/overview about a certain database project/product or related tool
• A deeply technical and developer-centric session about some project's internals or an API to connect to a database
• Providing "best practices" information for administrators

Any submission is welcome, as long as it has technical content and it's not a vendor pitch for a commercial program! Open Source is a prerequisite. The conference languages are German and English, so your talk could be of either language.

You should also read Giuseppe's advice on how to get your proposal accepted (it was aimed for the MySQL Conference, but the overall message still applies).
Baron Schwartz and Colin Charles wrote about the same topic - please keep these recommendations in mind when writing up your proposal! This makes it much easier for us to rate and review your submission.

Suggested projects

Some database projects and related technologies that we would like to be present at OpenSQLCamp include the following (in alphabetical order, without claim to completeness):

• Axion
• Berkeley DB
• CouchDB
• Apache Derby / Sun JavaDB
• Drizzle
• Firebird
• Hadoop
• Infobright
• HSQLDB
• Ingres
• MySQL
• Perst
• memcached
• Pentaho
• PostgreSQL
• SQLite
• Continuent Sequoia/Tungsten Replicator

We plan to approach and invite these communities directly to participate and contribute.

Today I received a confirmation that I will be giving a talk about "Working for a virtual company" in the main conference track of the Free and Open Source Conference (FrOSCon) in St. Augustin, Germany (August 22nd+23rd). Yay! I've been giving talks at every FrOSCon since its inception in 2006, so I am happy that I will be able to continue this tradition. FrOSCon is really a gem among the various Linux and Open Source Conferences in Germany — it takes place at a nice venue, the weather is usually warm and sunny and the conference organization is just great. And they of course always have a good lineup of speakers and OSS projects! As for the last years we (Sun/MySQL) will support the event by sponsoring and we will likely have a booth there as well. My colleague Joerg Moellenkamp also received his confirmation, it's quite likely that he'll be speaking about Solaris/OpenSolaris, as that's his home turf

In addition to that, the organizers agreed on providing us with a "Developer Room" for both days, which we would like to use to set up a subconference about Open Source Databases (there will also be a dedicated Java Subconference this year). Dubbed the "OpenSQLCamp 2009, European Edition", we plan to organize two days of talks and presentations to spread the word about the vibrant communities and large ecosystems around Open Source Databases, and to educate the attendees about what alternatives exist to commercial databases. So this will by no means be limited to MySQL only! The more variety, the better. I've set up a page on the OpenSQLCamp.org Wiki with some more details. More information will follow in the coming days. If you're interested to contribute, submit a talk or to know more, please also join the opensqlcamp discussion group! I'd like to thank Sheeri Cabral and Baron Schwartz for giving me a hand with the infrastructure - your help is appreciated!

I just realized that I haven't blogged for more than a month! Shame on me. But I will blame it on being away on conferences and vacation for quite some time And if you are following me on twitter, you may have noticed what I was going on in my life and that I did't get hit by a bus...

So what was going on since I returned back home from the MySQL Conference? First off, I uploaded und sorted my pictures from the conference and the Drizzle developer day on Flickr. I also uploaded the slides (PDF) from Colin and myself speaking about "MySQL Server Backup, Restoration, and Disaster Recovery Planning" to the MySQL Conference site and they are now available for download from the session page.

On May 4th and 5th I attended the amoocon in Rostock, Germany - a conference primarily about Open Source Telephony and VoIP, where I gave two talks (in German) about MySQL HA Solutions and MySQL Backup and Security Best Practices. There were several other MySQL-related sessions at this conference (e.g. Geert speaking about MySQL Cluster) and I was quite impressed to learn about how widely used it is in the VoIP/Telephony sector. The PDFs of my slides for both talks are available from the conference web site as well as on my slidespace on SlideShare (a very convenient service that I recently started using). There even is an MP3 and video recording of the HA talk, which is also linked from the session page mentioned above.

Right after the amoocon, I attended the next09 conference, which took place in Hamburg, Germany. On the first day I helped manning the Sun booth for some time (Sun Startup Essentials Germany was a sponsor of the event) and listened to some talks, on Wednesday I gave a presentation about "Working for a Virtual Company: How do we do it at MySQL?". A video recording of my talk is available from sevenload. Last time I checked the video was truncated, but I hope they will publish a complete version of it soon. Unfortunately I had a very bad speaking slot - the very first one in the morning (9:00am), after there was a party/social event going on the night before... But luckily there still were ~20-30 people in the audience. This was the first time that I gave this presentation and talked about something less technical, which was actually quite fun! As for the other recent talks, the slides are on SlideShare.

From May 14th to the 16th I was in Verona, Italy to speak about MySQL Backup and Security and bzr - The Bazaar source revision control system at the Italian phpDay. This was quite a nice event with ~150 attendees and Rasmus Lerdorf giving two talks as well. However, many of the sessions were in Italian, so I decided to spend some time walking around the city and taking lots of pictures. I also took a number pictures from the conference, but the light was pretty dim in the room and many shots turned out to be too blurry. Next year they plan to have the phpDay in Rimini - I definitely plan to be there!

Today I attended the Drizzle Developer Day which took place in the auditorium of the Sun Campus in Santa Clara.

Many of the the Drizzle core hackers as well as several other people interested in the development attended this event, hacking away and discussing various issues. Jeremy Zawodny gave a presentation about Craigslist's needs for Drizzle, Jay Pipes gave an overview over Google's protocol buffers library. I took a number of pictures, which you can find in my Flickr photo set.

I joined a group of people that haven't built Drizzle from source by themselves so far, helping them with installing Bazaar and the required libraries. As Drizzle requires several third-party libraries that sometimes are not included in the common linux distributions (or only in outdated versions), we spent some time in getting these build requirements fulfilled.

One of the requirements for building Drizzle is libdrizzle - the client & protocol library. So one first has to download and compile this one, before the actual build of the server can proceed. I noticed that the libdrizzle source distribution contained an RPM spec file already, so I've been working on adding libdrizzle to the openSUSE build service today. The packages for various distributions (Fedora, openSUSE, RHEL, Mandriva) will be available for download shortly. Along the way I also fixed several small issues in the spec file and created a libdrizzle-devel subpackage. The patches are now proposed for merging on Launchpad, I hope Eric will take a look at these shortly.

We've now concluded our call for papers for the MySQL Developer Room at FOSDEM 2009 in Brussels, Belgium, which will be open on Sunday, 8th of February from 09:00-17:00.

We received some excellent proposals and I am very excited about the schedule. Here's the quick summary of the talks:

• Vladimir Kolesnikov: Practicing DBA's Guide to the PBXT Storage Engine
• Kris Buytaert: Monitoring MySQL
• Geert Vanderkelen: MySQL Cluster
• Roland Bouman: MySQL 5.1 Plugins
• Kaj Arnö: MySQL, powering and using Social Networks
• Ewen Fortune: Percona MySQL patches and the XtraDB storage engine
• Giuseppe Maxia: Boost performance with MySQL 5.1 partitions
• Jurriaan Persyn: Database Sharding

See the Schedule page on the MySQL Forge for the detailed agenda, including the detailed session abstracts and speaker bios. These talks will soon appear in the general FOSDEM schedule, too. If you are interested in MySQL and any of the topics above, consider visiting us in Room AW1.126! Participation and attendance is totally free, though the organizers happily accept donations and sponsorships.

In addition to the Developer Room, MySQL will share a project desk with the OpenSolaris community. We are still looking for at least one more volunteer that would help us with manning the desk! If you are interested in helping out (2 hours at a minimum), please drop me a line!

Some days ago, I released version 0.11 of mylvmbackup a Perl script that performs consistent backups of a MySQL server by using LVM filesystem snapshots. The source archive as well as a generic RPM can be found on the project home page, packages for many Linux distributions are available on the openSUSE Build service.

This release includes some new functionality as well as numerous bug fixes and improvements, most notably:

• Added support for using rsnap as a backup backend (Matt Lohier)
• The documentation is now maintained in POD style instead of asciidoc (Matthew Boehm)
• Support using non-GNU tar and additional compression methods (e.g. bzip2, lzma) (Alexander Skwar)
• Code cleanups, improved error handling and logging

I would like to thank all the contributors for their support! More details about the changes in this release, directly from the ChangeLog:

• Added new option "--quiet" that suppresses informal logging output (warnings and errors will still be printed/logged)
• Applied patch from "kjetilho" that makes mylvmbackup more robust and paranoid when it comes to handling errors/failures (Bug #298175) Now the script aborts cleanly in case of any error.
• Fixed error handling in case of a failed DB connection (patch submitted by Matthew Boehm, Bug #280989)
• Merged changes from Alexander Skwar: Fix for Bug #278478 and implemented Blueprint "Improve the tar backup backend of mylvmbackup"
• Fixed Bug #271671: "overloading parameters does not work" by removing the default values for host and port from the configuration file and removing the unnecessary check for passing both host and socket at the same time. Updated documentation and configuration file comments accordingly.
• Applied patch suggested by "Jonas" to fix Bug #267944: "backup returns successfully when snapshot creation fails"
• Code cleanup: moved flushing of tables in a separate subroutine flush_tables()
• Code cleanup: moved log messages into the respective subroutines
• Code cleanup: use return values of subroutines instead of updating global variables
• Improved some log messages to explain what was DONE or FAILED
• Code cleanup: build up long command strings in a $command variable before passing it to system()
• Renamed subroutine create_snapshot() to create_lvm_snapshot()
• Merged patch from Matthew Boehm: Removed old asciidoc documentation in favor of POD style. This removes the dependency on the external program a2x for creating documentation and uses the 'built-in' pod2html and pod2man instead. Updated the Makefile to accommodate the change.
• Applied patch from Matthew Boehm to make the backup file name suffix configurable via a "--suffix" option. Updated the man page accordingly.
• Applied patch from Matt Lohier to support rsnap as a backup backend 
• Moved the list of contributors from the man page into a separate CREDITS file, added missing names

Enjoy!

FOSDEM 2009, one of the biggest European Open Source conferences, will take place on February 7-8 in Brussels, Belgium. Today I received a confirmation from the organizers: MySQL will have a developer room on Sunday, the 8th! This is very cool.

My idea was to organize some kind of MySQL mini-conference, with a focus on developers and DBAs. I am going to send out a more formal CfP soon, but if you have any ideas or suggestions for a talks/sessions already, please get in touch with me!

In addition to the devroom, I have also been invited to give a talk about MySQL High Availability solutions in the conference main track. In this talk I plan to cover some commonly used HA setups for MySQL, including the OSS components/tools (for Linux and OpenSolaris) involved. I will mention MySQL Cluster as well, explaining the relationship and architecture of MySQL Server and NDB Cluster. I hope this will be of interest to the audience.

I also submitted two lightning talk proposals: "New features in MySQL 5.1" and one about "Why you should use Bazaar for maintaining your OSS project", but I won't know if these were accepted until the end of December...

See you there!

I am happy to announce that there now is a MySQL User Group in Los Angeles, California! Their first meetup will take place on Nov. 19th at 7:30pm, Carl Gelbart will give a presentation about "Infobright, an Open Source Data Warehouse". The location has not been finalized yet, it seems: Sun offered them to choose between one of their locations in Universal City, El Segundo or Irvine. Thanks a lot to Joe Devon for stepping up and volunteering to organize this group, it's appreciated!

And if you are not able to join the LA MySQL User Group because you live somewhere else - take a look at http://mysql.meetup.com/ for a local MySQL User Group in your area! If there isn't one yet, have you considered organizing one by yourself? It's easy and fun and we will actually sponsor the Meetup.com fees for you! Also take a look at the MySQL Forge Wiki for some hints on how to create and run a user group (and make sure to add your own findings and experiences to these pages).

One of the sessions at DrupalCon I attended was Larry Garfield's talk about "Drupal Databases: The Next Generation", which gave me a good insight into the current state of the Drupal database layer and how they plan to overhaul it for Drupal 7. The key points that I took away:

• A new API based on PDO
• Object-oriented, requiring PHP5
• Support for using prepared statements
• A unified access API
• A query builder
• More support for other database systems (currently Drupal supports MySQL and PostgreSQL only). In particular, they are keen on adding SQLite support, to ease local development.
• Support for master-slave replication (by randomly distributing reads among the hosts)
• Support for using different database types in parallel (e.g. using SQLite for read-only tables, MySQL for everything else)

The slides and a video of the presentation are available, if you want to check it out. There is a task list on the Drupal.org web site that keeps track of the ongoing activities.