Entries tagged as development
Tuesday, September 9. 2014
The annual GUUG Frühjahrsfachgespräch 2014 will take place in two weeks from now, from September 23.-26. at the Ruhr-University in Bochum, Germany.
The agenda is packed with interesting sessions covering a wide range of topics relevant to developers and system administrators. In addition to the regular talks, the first two days provide day-long tutorials to get a deep-dive into interesting technologies like OpenStack, Puppet, secure web development or setting up file services.
I'll be speaking about reStructuredText and Sphinx, a very powerful framework for writing technical documentation.
Register now!
Thursday, May 8. 2014
The German Unix User Group (GUUG) will hold their annual conference "Frühjahrsfachgespräch" on September 23-26 this year (I know, not really "Frühjahr" anymore, but this is how it is).
The Call for Presentations is still open until May 31st. Talks can be proposed in German and English, and there are slots for longer tutorials as well.
The range of possible topics is broad, so if you think you have anything interesting to share with a very passionate and technical audience of sysadmins and developers, here are some suggestions:
- Operating Systems/Applications: architectures, privilege concepts, new developments, administration, mobile systems
- Relevant new OS Kernel features: new developments in Linux-, BSD- or other Spen Source OS kernels
- Networking: protocols, technologies
- Virtualisation/High Availability: OS, networks, cluster, SAN, file services (high-) avialability, OS/storage virtualisation and cloud
- File systems: distributed file systems, cluster file systems, special purpose file systems
- Middleware: databases, application servers, etc.
- IT Security: organisational and technical aspects
- Data Center Infrastructure: climate control, energy efficiency and monitoring
- Operations: monitoring, backup/recovery
- Non-technical Topics: work organisation, legal aspects, licensing and patents, education and training
This year, I'm honoured to be part of the reviewing committee and we've received a number of interesting proposals already. But we'd like to see more!
So please don't hesitate and submit your proposal now!
Thank you.
Wednesday, November 13. 2013
This year's conference season is coming to an end for me soon – I have three more events to go before I can enjoy the Christmas holidays:
On 2013-11-20, I'll be at the DOAG Konferenz in Nuremberg (Germany), where I will talk about the following topics (in German):
I've also submitted a proposal for an "Unconference" (or BOF) about Oracle Linux - this will take place on the same day, at 12:00-13:00.
From Nuremberg I will travel directly to Munich, where I will speak about Oracle Linux at a Private Cloud mit Oracle Linux und Oracle VM Seminar on Thursday, 2013-11-21. If you would like to learn more about how to set up and manage your private cloud infrastructure using Oracle Linux, Oracle VM and Oracle Enterprise Manager, this event gives you an opportunity to talk to customers who share their experiences and experts that can provide additional background information. This is a free event, registration via the event web site is required.
Early in December (2013-12-02/2013-12-03), I'll be attending the UKOUG Tech Conference in Manchester (UK) speaking about the following topic:
Here's a short recap of some past events I attended earlier this year:
On 2013-08-24/2013-08-25 I attended FrOSCon 8 in St. Augustin (Germany). Oracle was a silver sponsor and exhibitor — I was there to represent Oracle Linux at our booth. It was really nice to meet many people that I had not seen for quite a while. FrOSCon was well organized (as usual), the only bummer was that the weather did not cooperate and the social event could not take place outside.
2013-09-22/2013-09-25 - Oracle OpenWorld 2013 - San Francisco (US). In addition to attending numerous meetings with customers, I also contributed to the event with the following sessions:
Thursday, April 28. 2011
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!
Monday, November 1. 2010
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!
Saturday, March 6. 2010
I recently received a question from Robin Schumacher at Calpont, the makers of the InfiniDB analytics database engine for MySQL: "How would you recommend we try and get bundled in with the various Linux distros?"
Since this question has come up several times before, I thought it might make sense to blog about my take on this.
First of all, please note that there is a difference between "being part of the core distribution" and "being available from a distributor's package repository". The latter one is relatively easy, the former can be hard, as you need to convince the distributor that your application is worth devoting engineering resources to maintain and support your application as part of their product. It's also a space issue – distributions need to make sure that the core packages still fit on the installation media (e.g. CD-ROMs or a DVD). Therefore they take a very close look at each package and if it's really needed to be part of the installation medium or if it's fine to provide it for download from a package repository instead.
Distributors prefer to keep their core product small and restricted to the "basic OS building blocks". While MySQL might still be considered to be a part of this, this probably does not apply to the various plugins and extensions that are available for it. Therefore the best approach is to invest some engineering time and start doing the packaging yourself, either by hiring an engineer capable of creating and maintaining the packages, or by finding someone in your community who has the required experiences and is willing to do it.
While it's of course possible to set up and maintain your own build and package hosting infrastructure for that, I recommend to make use of the existing services provided by the distributors.
The top tier distributors all provide means of offloading the maintenance of "non-core" packages to their community, offering various options for packages to be made available. For example, Novell/openSUSE provide the free "Build Service", which is capable of building packages for other distributions as well (e.g. Fedora, Mandriva, Debian/Ubuntu, etc.). In addition to automating the builds, the Build Service also takes care of the distribution via their download mirror network and ensures that your application can be found via their package search interface.
Red Hat/Fedora provide something similar, named "Koji" – but it's "Fedora only". Here's a HOWTO that outlines the process of becoming a Fedora package maintainer.
Ubuntu/Canonical have "Personal Package Archives (PPAs) – if your project is hosted on Launchpad already, that might be something to look into for providing Debian/Ubuntu packages. Alternatively you could join the Debian project and start building and maintaining your package there. They maintain a list of "Work-Needing and Prospective Packages", a description of the process on how to become a new maintainer is outlined here.
If you'd like to target Solaris/OpenSolaris as well, there is the OpenSolaris Source Juicer – a web service which allows OpenSolaris community developers to build packages (using RPM spec files) and publish them for review, so they will be included in an official package repository. The Software Porters Community Group coordinates, advocates, encourages and helps with the porting of Software from multiple Platforms to the OpenSolaris Platform.
Wednesday, March 3. 2010
CMake is a cross-platform, open-source build system, maintained by Kitware, Inc.
From the CMake.org home page:
CMake is a family of tools designed to build, test and package software. CMake is used to control the software compilation process using simple platform and compiler independent configuration files. CMake generates native makefiles and workspaces that can be used in the compiler environment of your choice.
It has been used for building the MySQL Server on Windows since MySQL 5.0 – the initial CMake build support was added in August 2006.
For building MySQL on all other platforms, the GNU autotools (autoconf, automake and libtool) are currently being used.
CMake is used in some other MySQL projects as well, e.g.
On February 22nd, Vladislav Vaintroub pushed the changes required to implement WorkLog#5161 "CMake-based unified build system" into the "mysql-next-mr" branch (aka the "Celosia" mile stone).
From this version on, CMake can also be used to build MySQL on Linux and other Unix platforms. For the time being, the autoconf/automake files are still available as well, but will be phased out once the CMake build enviroment has reached the desired level of maturity. The change was announced on February 28th on our "internals" developer discussion list.
The purpose of WL#5161 is to simplify the MySQL build system. It is much easier and less error-prone to maintain a unified build system for all platforms than two separate ones.
CMake has been chosen because of several reasons; the worklog description lists a few pro-CMake arguments (slightly rephrased):
- CMake works on Windows. The GNU buildsystem does not really work and likely never will work natively on Windows (Using Cygwin is not really an option).
- Traditionally, new MySQL features that required changes in the build environment (e.g. the plugin system, unit tests, most recently googletest integration) were always implemented on Unix first, leaving Windows behind (sometimes for years). This would not happen with a unified build system.
- MySQL already uses CMake since 2006 on Windows, so we do not need to start from scratch, only port what we have to Unix.
- CMake runs on every OS and compiler we support.
- It is simple to obtain and install on a wide range of platforms. It is available in all major Linux package repositories (e.g. Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSUSE). It is also in the OpenSolaris repository, known as SUNWCmake. It's in FreeBSD ports and available for Mac OS X. It is also very simple to compile it from source, the single prerequisite is a working C++ compiler and make utility.
- CMake has support for features we need and might need, e.g. system checks or cross-compiling.
- CMake provides integrated support for packaging. It can handle both simple packages (tar.gz or zip archives) and more complex things like DEB and RPM without much extra coding.
- Good integration with the popular IDEs (Visual Studio, Xcode, Eclipse CDT, KDevelop). Developing in an IDE makes the development process more enjoyable, and potentially it lowers the barrier for external contributors. Of course, CMake can generate traditional Unix Makefiles, which appear to be are superior to the ones generated by GNU autotools (for example, they have progress indicators, colored output and working dependencies).
- The scripting language used by CMake is simpler than m4 used by autotools.
- CMake is a single small tool, not a bunch of different tools as in GNU system (autoconf, autoheader, automake, libtool)
I'd like to mention a few additional reasons:
- Out-of-source builds – CMake can separate the build directory from the source directory. This is convenient, as your working source tree is not cluttered with object files and other fragments of the build process.
- Build configuration using a GUI. The cmake-gui package (based on Nokia/TrollTech's Qt library) provides a convenient way of enabling and configuring the various available build options. This is much better than having to memorize all the required defines and configuration flags.
- Integrated support for creating a wide range of package formats.
The CMake Wiki lists a number of other "nice to have" features.
From a developer perspective, I hope that it will make it much easier to finally implement two things that many developers working with MySQL have been waiting for (now that the build code has been cleaned up):
Building MySQL with CMake is quite simple and straighforward – the process is outlined on the MySQL Forge Wiki. The document is still work in progress and we'd like to encourage you to take a look at it, try to follow the steps and update/improve the Wiki page, if needed! Your feedback on the build process is appreciated. Feel free to join our internals mailing list to discuss your impressions and observations or submit a bug report via the Bug Database. It's likely that the build still has a few rough edges that we'd like to fix quickly (e.g. BUG#51502 – a fix for this one is already commited to the mysql-next-mr-bugfixing source tree and will be merged into the mysql-next-mr trunk soon).
If you're new to CMake, you might want to take a look at the "Getting Started With CMake (An End-User's Perspective) For Cross-Platform Building" screencast or the "Running CMake" article.
Happy hacking!
Monday, December 7. 2009
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:
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!
Thursday, November 5. 2009
This blog post is a by-product of my preparation work for an upcoming talk titled "Why you should be using a distributed version control system (DVCS) for your project" at SAPO Codebits in Lisbon (December 3-5, 2009). Publishing these thoughts prior to the conference serves two purposes: getting some peer review on my findings and acting as a teaser for the actual talk. So please let me know — did I cover the relevant aspects or did I miss anything? What's your take on DVCS vs. the centralized approach? Why do you prefer one over the other? I'm looking forward to your comments!
Even though there are several distributed alternatives available for some years now (with Bazaar, git and Mercurial being the most prominent representatives here), many large and popular Open Source projects still use centralized systems like Subversion or even CVS to maintain their source code. While Subversion has eased some of the pains of CVS (e.g. better remote access, renaming/moving of files and directories, easy branching), the centralized approach by itself poses some disadvantages compared to distributed systems. So what are these? Let me give you a few examples of the limitations that a centralized system like Subversion has and how these affect the possible workflows and development practices.
Continue reading "Aspects and benefits of distributed version control systems (DVCS)"
Thursday, October 29. 2009
So you're a small startup company, ready to go live with your product, which you intend to distribute under an Open Source License. Congratulations, you made a wise decision! Your developers have been hacking away frantically, getting the code in good shape for the initial launch. Now it's time to look into what else needs to be built and setup, so you're ready to welcome the first members of your new community and to ensure they are coming back!
Keep the following saying in mind, which especially holds true in the Open Source world: "You never get a second chance to make a first impression!". While the most important thing is of course to have a compelling and useful product, this blog post is an attempt to highlight some other aspects about community building and providing the adequate infrastructure. This insight is based on my own experiences and my observations from talking with many people involved in OSS startups and projects.
Continue reading "Some friendly advice for bootstrapping your OSS project"
Friday, October 16. 2009
With IntelliJ now being available under an Open Source license, developers have another option to choose from when it comes to Java-based IDEs/Frameworks (Eclipse and NetBeans being the other two prominent ones). Choice is always good, and being an Open Source enthusiast, I of course welcome JetBrain's move!
However, as I'm not really a heavy GUI-based IDE user myself, I can't really comment on which one is the best. These kind of discussions tend to turn into a Holy War anyway... In the end it's likely that each of them gets the job done and you have to come to your own conclusions, based on your personal preference and requirements.
I personally would be interested in seeing how their support for PHP or Python compares to the one in NetBeans. Their plugin repository lists more that 560 plugins, including many for database connectivity/modeling/navigation (incl. support for MySQL). I'm also glad to see that they have a plugin for Bazaar, something that I'm desperately missing from NetBeans!
Interestingly, they decided to keep a few parts proprietary, it's going to be interesting to see how this will turn out for them and if developers will be willing to pay for these extra features, considering that most of this is available for free from the other two projects.
Their Contributor License Agreement looks like it has been derived from the Sun Contributor Agreement (SCA), which is always nice to see. I assume this can be attributed to Roman Strobl - I was positively surprised to notice that he joined their team as a technology evangelist in June! Roman did a great job in spreading the NetBeans and OpenSolaris gospel at Sun before and I briefly met him at this year's FOSDEM conference in Brussels. Congratulations!
Tuesday, June 30. 2009
Last week I gave a MySQL University Presentation about how to contribute code to MySQL. This time DimDim did not fail to record the session, even though there is a funky overlap of audio from Stefan Hinz (the moderator) and myself at the beginning. I had a bit of a slow start into the presentation, because of a very nasty headache that plagued me that day. But we had a lively discussion at the end and I hope it was useful to the participants.
In case you have missed it, you can now watch the playback or download the session slides:
Tuesday, June 9. 2009
As you may have heard, we're switching to a new release model with the upcoming MySQL 5.4 release.
If you are curious to learn more about what will change in the way in which future versions MySQL will be developed and released, make sure to attend our next MySQL University session about The New MySQL Release Model on Thursday, 11th of June, 14:00 UTC. Tomas Ulin, our director of MySQL server development will go through the planned changes and would also like to get your input and feedback on these changes.
We're using DimDim for broadcasting this session, which allows you to listen to the audio while watching the slides with your web browser. You can comment and discuss via a chat function, too! We're looking forward to your input. To attend, point your browser to this address (Adobe flash player required).
The session will be recorded and posted on the MySQL Forge Wiki, so you can watch the presentation later as well. You can also provide your feedback on the release model by posting on the MySQL Internals mailinglist.
Tuesday, April 21. 2009
The MySQL Conference & Expo 2009 in Santa Clara is now in full swing and Karen Padir just gave the opening keynote, talking about Sun's continued and improved commitment to Open Source and the upcoming MySQL products like the MySQL 5.4 performance release or MySQL Cluster 7.0. One of the activities that she mentioned in her keynote is our ongoing activity to improve the acceptance and incorporation of patches contributed by the community.
We've scheduled a BoF about this topic tonight (7:30pm in Ballroom A), where we would like to talk about the recent changes that we've made and discuss a new way in how to produce future releases of the MySQL Server on a shorter and more predictable schedule. We've invited Tomas Ulin (Director of MySQL Server) to join us and explain the proposed changes to the MySQL release model and how they will help us to incorporate patch contributions and make them available to the community at a faster rate.
Please join us and let us know what you think of these changes and what else we can do to make it easier and attractive to contribute patches to the MySQL Server! There will be free T-Shirts as well 
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