Lenz Grimmer's blog

I've been working in a fully distributed work environment for almost 8 years now (I joined MySQL AB in April, 2002). Therefore I've been reading Toni Schneider's blog post about the "5 reasons why your company should be distributed" with great interest – he raised several points that I fully agree with and which I covered in my talks about "Working for a virtual company - how we do it at MySQL" at last year's next09 conference (slides, video) and at FrOSCon 2009 (video).

However, Toni draws a profusely positive picture here, or, as my dear colleague Dean pointed out "The blog overly simplifies the realities of a distributed workforce, making it sound like it's all ponies and rainbows".

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.

The summer break seems to be over and the event season is heating up again! There is a number of conferences and events coming up in the next months — here is a quick summary of the events that I plan to attend.

This Friday I will attend an event here in Hamburg: the "Silpion Sommerfest", organized by Silpion (a local IT solutions provider which is a partner of Sun Microsystems as well). I will be there to network and talk about MySQL.

This coming weekend (2009-09-12/2009-09-13), there will be the PHP Unconference here in Hamburg, Germany . It will consist of two days of Barcamp-style sessions about PHP. Sun/MySQL are sponsors of the event and I expect several of my team mates to be there as well. With more than 180 participants, the event is already sold out.

The following week I will be attending the openSUSE Conference in Nuremberg, Germany on 2009-09-17/2009-09-20. I will give the opening keynote on Thursday morning. Titled "Working in a Virtual Community", I will talk about the pros and cons of working in a virtual organization, giving an overview about some of the technical and social aspects that play a role in working with virtual communities.

On December 10th and 11th I will be attending the 4. Secure Linux Administration Conference 2009 (SLAC) in Berlin, Germany. I've been invited to talk about MySQL and will give two sessions about MySQL Backup & Security as well as MySQL High Availability Solutions. The Call for Papers for this event is still open, so if you have a technical, "best practice" talk that might be relevant for system administrators, consider submitting your proposal!

It's almost two weeks now since FrOSCon and the OpenSQL Camp subconference have taken place in Sankt Augustin, Germany — about time for a summary and update from my side!

First off, I would like to thank all of the participants and supporters, particularly my colleagues Regina Steyer and Iris Musiol for the perfect logistics and co-sponsoring as well as Uli Graef, Thorsten Frueauf, Matthias Schmidt, Alexander Rubin and Joerg Moellenkamp for manning the Sun booth and the help on site.

Another big Thank You goes out to my team mates Giuseppe and Colin as well as to Sheeri K. Cabral, who were a big help in keeping the OpenSQL Camp on track and by supporting the event by giving talks. In addition to that, Sheeri recorded most of the OpenSQL Camp sessions on video and published them in record time!

So here's a quick summary of both events from my side, starting with the main conference.

Sun was a Gold sponsor of the event and we had a booth right at the main entrance area; it could hardly be missed. It consisted of two large and two small desks as well as a divider behind them. For demos, we had a (slightly noisy) Sun Fire X2200 M2 Server and four SunRay 2 Thin Clients (which by themselves triggered a lot of questions and curiosity by many visitors). The booth was flanked by rollup-banners on both sides as well as various posters attached to the divider. Here's a picture of our booth before the event opened:



We demoed Open Solaris, Open HA Cluster, NetBeans/Java and MySQL. We also had a lot of brochures about various products, OpenSolaris 2009.06 Live-CDs incl. booklets as well as some MySQL-T-Shirts to hand out. We distributed over 300 CDs and received a lot of positive feedback about the distribution.

We also had a number of talks in the main conference track (both German and English):

• Lenz Grimmer: Working for a Virtual Company - How we do it at MySQL (OGG Video)
• Giuseppe Maxia: MySQL Sandbox 3 - Making your life with databases easier than ever (OGG Video)
• Ulrich Graef: ZFS - Neue Funktionen und Technologien
• Thorsten Früauf: Hochverfügbarkeit mit minimalem Cluster - Open HA Cluster on OpenSolaris (OGG Video)
• Jörg Möllenkamp: Insights to Opensolaris (OGG Video)

The comments and ratings of these sessions were generally very positive. Our booth was well attended, especially during the session breaks. In total, there were over 1.400 visitors at the conference over the two days.

I personally did not attend many sessions in the main conference tracks, as I was too occupied with the OpenSQL Camp and the booth organization. However, I managed to listen to Uli Graef's talk, which was a very technical and interesting session about ZFS features and internals. Being a big fan of ZFS myself, this was a very worthwhile session to be at and my impression was that it encouraged others to take a closer look at this truly amazing file system.

The second talk I attended was Sunday's keynote by Dries Buytaert from the Drupal project about "The Secrets of Building and Participating in Open Source
Communities". Dries is a great speaker with visually stunning slides. He is funny, too — if you have a moment, you should watch the video recording of his keynote. An uncut "pre-release" version of his talk is already available as an OGG Video file.

As for previous FrOSCons (is that the proper plural?), there was a social event scheduled for Saturday evening, providing barbecue (Steaks and Sausages as well as vegetarian dishes) and drinks. This event usually takes place outside and is always an excellent opportunity for networking and talking with key people from other OSS communities and projects. And there was plenty of time for talking - the queues for the grilled food were long...

Here is a list of other blogs and articles about FrOSCon that are worth a read (in no particular order and both German and English):

• http://www.c0t0d0s0.org/archives/5878-FrOSCon-2009-first-day.html
• http://www.c0t0d0s0.org/archives/5879-FrOSCon-09-Nachlese.html
• http://blogs.sun.com/TF/entry/hochverf%C3%BCgbarkeit_mit_minimalem_cluster
• http://robilad.livejournal.com/53194.html
• http://blogs.sun.com/bblfish/entry/froscon_the_free_and_open
• http://www.linux-magazin.de/content/view/full/43032
• http://community.oreilly.de/blog/2009/08/25/das-war-die-froscon-2009/
• http://www.naturalnik.de/wordpress/2009/08/froscon-2009/
• http://www.alexander-stelter.de/blog/archives/361-FrOSCon-2009-Review-+-Bilder.html

OpenSQL Camp, European Edition

In addition to the main conference tracks, FrOSCon also provided a number of so-called "Developer Rooms" to OSS projects, so that they could organize sub-conferences or hackfests of their own. We applied for a room to set up a conference dubbed "OpenSQL Camp", related to the topic of Open Source databases, which was approved.

We then sent out a call for papers and invited people from the many OSS database communities to join us and talk about their projects. Every session proposal was published on the OpenSQL Camp web site and people were able to vote on the sessions they were most interested in via email or twitter:

• http://opensqlcamp.org/Events/2009/Proposed_Sessions
• http://opensqlcamp.org/Events/2009/Reviewing_and_Voting

The organization and scheduling of the talks and speakers was done via the FrOSCon conference system (Pentabarf), which made it very easy to perform this task and also made sure that the OpenSQL Camp sessions were included in the main conference program. Below is a full list of sessions at our subconference (see the FrOSCon Program page for abstracts, speaker info, links and slides). We had two cancellations by speakers on short notice, but were able to cover the gaps with ad-hoc presentations. I'd like to send a special thanks to Geert Vanderkelen, who gave a great presentation about MySQL Cluster despite the very short notice and some technical difficulties at the beginning!

• Sheeri K. Cabral: A Better mysqltuner (Video)
• Linas Virbalas: Bringing Master/Slave into the 21st Century using Tungsten Database Clustering (Video)
• Holger Klemt: Firebird - a really free database used in free and commercial projects (Video)
• Seppo Jaakola: Galera Replication (Video)
• Kristian Waagan: Getting acquainted with Apache Derby (Video)
• Stephane Combaudon: Minimizing data access with covering indexes
• Lenz Grimmer: MySQL High Availability Solutions (Video)
• Jan Kneschke: MySQL Proxy: a MySQL toolbox (Video)
• Felix Schupp: New kid on the block: The BlackRay Data Engine (Video)
• Vladimir Kolesnikov: PBXT: Technology trends that affect your database (Video)
• Panel Discussion: The OSS Toolshed Shootout (Video)
• Darren Cassar: Securich - MySQL user administration and security made easy!
• Giuseppe Maxia: Sharding for the masses (Video)
• Geert Vanderkelen: An introduction to MySQL Cluster

Most talks attracted between 20-50 attendees and we had a great mix of topics from several different database projects (with a slight majority of MySQL-related talks). The Panel Discussion (moderated by me), called the "OSS Toolshed Shootout" went quite well and the speakers had a good time answering questions on various topics about their projects. Thanks again to all OpenSQL Camp speakers for making this event a success!

All in all I think that both FrOSCon and OpenSQL Camp were well worth supporting and attending - we were able to provide insight and trigger some interesting discussions among the OSS enthusiasts and developers in the audience. It was also a good opportunity in get in touch with many people of other OSS communities, fostering the MySQL (and other Sun OSS projects) ecosystem.

Here is a Flickr slide show of my own pictures - more photos can be found in the FrOSCon Gallery and the links page on the Wiki.

I personally look forward to next year's FrOSCon - a Big Thanks to the organizers for another great event!

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 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

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!

My colleague Joerg Moellenkamp stepped up and established the HHOSUG - a local OpenSolaris User Group here in Hamburg, Germany. It has a web-home with discussion forums on Xing.com. Our first physical meetup will take place on Wednesday, 4th of February, 17:45. We will meet in the the meeting rooms at Sun's Hamburg offices (Nagelsweg 55, 20097 Hamburg). If you plan to attend, please RSVP here. We have the following topics on the agenda:

• Organizational issues
• Collecting ideas/suggestions for the HHOSUG: what shall this group aim for?
• Technical session: OpenSolaris 2008.11 internals (Time slider, pkg, etc)

Luckily, Wednesday is usually the day that I am in the office anyway, so I'll just stick around. I look forward to meeting many fellow OpenSolaris fans 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).

As I mentioned some time ago, Software Freedom Day 08 will take place on Saturday, 20th of September 2008.

Coincidentally, the a large number of Sun/MySQL Engineers and other Sun folks will be in Riga, Latvia for an internal developer meeting around this day. To make use of this opportunity, we plan to give a number of sessions and presentations (in english) about various topics and to contribute to this global celebration of Open Source Software.

We've set up a Team Page on the Software Freedom Day web site for this event - the venue will be the Cafeteria Conference room in the basement of the University of Latvia, Riga, which can accomodate 60-80 people:

Raiņa bulvāris 19
Rīga, LV-1586

There is no entrance fee and you don't have to register - just come by and meet with us! There will be free coffee, refreshments and cake during the breaks.

In the evening, Sun will host a social event (incl. free drinks and food) in the SAS Radisson Daugava hotel, starting at 19:30:

Radisson SAS Daugava Hotel
Kugu 24, Rīga, LV-1048, Latvia
Tel.:+371 6706 1147; Fax: +371 6706 1101

We've set up a tentative schedule (45 minutes per session plus 15 minutes of Q&A), please check the Wiki for eventual last-minute changes!

11:00-12:00: MySQL/Open Source in Latvia (Evijs Taube, Sun Microsystems)
12:00-13:00: Open Source Business Models: how to build a business around free software (Speaker TBD)
13:00-13:30: Lunch Break / Ask the Guru your tech questions
13:30-14:30: MySQL in the Enterprise: Customer references, commercial offerings (Rob Young/Robin Schumacher, Sun Microsystems)
15:00-16:00: MySQL Community Overview: How to engage and contribute (Giuseppe Maxia/Jay Pipes/Lenz Grimmer, Sun Microsystems)
16:15-17:15: MySQL Performance tuning best practices (Jay Pipes, Sun Microsystems)
17:15-18:15: Maintaining your Open source project with Bazaar and Launchpad (Lenz Grimmer/Giuseppe Maxia, Sun Microsystems)
19.30: Social event: Software demonstration, buffet and free beer in the SAS Radisson Daugava hotel

We'd like to thank Leo Trukšāns, Michael Dexter and Georg Richter for their help and support in getting this event arranged and organized! I look forward to being there and help to spread the word about the stuff that keeps me occupied for more than 13 years now

I had a nice chat with Kieran from Acquia at DrupalCon last week - we discussed how people running local Drupal user groups could expand their outreach into other communities, in particular into the MySQL User Groups. Scott Mattoon captured our conversation on video, which is now available on blip.tv:

Click To Play

The gist of what we talked about: if you are organizing a local Drupal User Group Meetup, check out http://mysql.meetup.com to find out if there is a local MySQL user group nearby. Chances are high that there is! And if not, you may find at least people in the area that would be interested in meeting about this subject. We also maintain list of user groups on the MySQL Forge Wiki. Consider extending your invitation for your next meetup to these folks as well! It's very likely that someone would be interested to learn more about Drupal. The same applies to other user groups, e.g. from the PHP community.

I personally run a MySQL User Group here in Hamburg, and I usually extend my invitations to a number of channels and mailinglists, including the local PHP, Perl and Linux User Groups. Every once in a while, a new member from these communities shows up.

So this thing works the other way around, too: if you are the organizer of a MySQL Meetup, have you thought about looking at http://groups.drupal.org/ yet? Maybe you will find a Drupal User Group in your very own town that you could invite to learn more about MySQL and exchange contacts? If you are looking for more tips on how to run and expand your User Group, I've created a page with useful hints about this topic on the MySQL Forge Wiki. Your feedback and additions are very welcome!

Last weekend I finally found some time to upload pictures that I had taken during various events that I attended in the past few months. So here are my impressions from the following events:

• PHP Unconference in Hamburg on 2008-04-26
• MySQL Meetup Mashup in Hamburg, 2008-04-07
• MySQL Meetup Mashup in Berlin, 2008-04-08
• MySQL Conference & Expo 2008 in Santa Clara, 2008-04 (these are available from flickr as well)
• CommunityOne in San Francisco, 2008-05-05
• JavaOne in San Francisco, 2008-05
• LinuxTag in Berlin, 2008-05

These are probably the last pictures that I have taken with my trusty old Pentax Optio S4 - I just received my new camera, a Canon PowerShot A720 IS. I have just started to toy around with it, but the first results look promising! The Pentax served me well for several years - I've taken 9745 pictures with it. But it had a few deficiencies, particularly the slow startup and flash recharge time and the bad quality of pictures indoors bothered me for quite a while. But it is very small and handy and the metal housing makes it quite sturdy.

The first picture taken with my new camera: a picture of the old one.

And probably the last picture taken using the old camera: my new Canon.

I made it to the US safely, even though I almost missed my connecting flight in Heathrow (even my luggage made it, hooray!). I reached the Hotel just in time to directly head off to the traditional pre-conference party at Mårten's house. However, we just stayed there shortly (barely long enough to say hi to everybody) and then headed to the MySQL pre-conference dinner (organized by Arjen). It was nice meeting such a large number of the key MySQL community people in one place! I was especially surprised about the presence of Jonathan Schwartz and Rich Green - this added a nice touch!

Today I am attending Stewart's tutorial session about MySQL Cluster. So far it has been quite entertaining and informative! We'll continue with hands-on excercises on setting up a cluster configuration on the attendees' laptops after the lunch break.

I have uploaded pictures from yesterday and this morning to my foto set on flickr (which I will also post to the MySQL Conference 08 Flickr group) and will try to continue doing so for the rest of the conference. Enjoy!

A gentle reminder: next week, there will be two more stops of the MySQL Meetup Mashup Tour:

• Monday, April 7th, 19:00: Hamburg, Germany. We will meet in the meeting rooms of the local Sun Microsystems offices ( Nagelsweg 55, 22097 Hamburg). There will be two technical sessions: Giuseppe will talk about the MySQL Sandbox, Kay Koll will give a presentation about how to combine MySQL with OpenOffice.org. He will also describe the new report generator and give an overview over the future of OpenOffice. You can register for this event via meetup.com or Xing.com.
• Tuesday, April 8th, 17:00: Berlin, Germany. This event will take place in the rooms of the Berlin offices of Sun Microsystems (Komturstrasse 18a, 12099 Berlin). This time, Giuseppe will talk about MySQL as an open platform, Kristian Köhntopp will share a few hints he gathered while doing consulting work at customer sites. Please use Xing.com to register for this event.

At both events, colleagues from Sun and MySQL will be present to answer questions and discuss the acquisition of MySQL by Sun and all things Open Source. There will be free drinks and food as well!

We look forward to welcome users from the various related Sun products/projects, e.g. OpenOffice, Java, OpenSolaris, Glassfish or Netbeans. There is so much opportunity for collaboration and exchange of experience - I am very excited to be at both meetings to meet and talk with people from these communities. See you there! 

As Kaj already pointed out, the Sun/MySQL Meetup Mashup Tour will also make a stop in Munich, Germany this Friday. I will be there as well, we will meet at 14:00 at the Hilton Munich Park Hotel. Kaj and some other Sun people will join us a bit later. If you are in the area, make sure to stop by!

By the way, the Meetup Mashup Tour will make at least one more stop in Germany - I am organizing an event in Hamburg, Germany which will take place on Monday, April 7th (19:00). This was initially planned as another regular MySQL Meetup, but I offered to expand the scope a bit. We will now meet at the Sun offices, Sun will sponsor some food and drinks! In addition to the usual MySQL Meetup crowd, we expect participation from various Sun communities (e.g. OpenOffice/StarOffice, Java or OpenSolaris). As usual, there will be a MySQL tech talk (this time held by Giuseppe).

I look forward to this event - it will be exciting to mingle with the people from these other communities and to exchange experiences and make new contacts. If you live somewhere around the Hambur area and would like to participate, please RSVP via Meetup.com or Xing.com soon!