Lenz Grimmer's blog

I feel like I just got back home from Oracle OpenWorld (check out my pictures) and some vacation, but I'll be on the road again next week to attend LinuxCon Europe in Barcelona. I'll be there from Monday (Nov. 5th) until Wednesday evening. Oracle is sponsoring the event and we'll have a booth at the exhibition area (booth #19), handing out free Oracle Linux and Oracle VM DVDs. I'll be at the booth every now and then and plan to give a short introduction and live demo of Ksplice rebootless updates on Monday evening (6:00pm).

Two colleagues and myself will also give some presentations:

• Status of Linux Tracing - Elena Zannoni, Oracle - Tue 6th, 14:20
• OCFS2: Status and Overview - Lenz Grimmer, Oracle - Wed 7th, 10:40
• MySQL Security Model and pluggable authentication - Kristofer Pettersson, Oracle - Wed 7th, 13:50

I look forward to meeting many people I still know from the SuSE days and to learn more about what's new in Linux - the schedule looks very promising and it will be a tough challenge to pick the right talks. And if you happen to be in Barcelona these days, I'd like to recommend two related events:

• On Monday evening (Nov. 5th, 8:00pm), there will be a "Cluster / Storage / HA Geek Dinner" which I plan to attend. Please get in touch with Florian Haas directly for an invite to the Google+ Event. Thanks to Florian and Lars Marowsky-Brée for setting this up!
• A week later, on Tuesday (Nov. 13th, 7:00pm), there will be a MySQL community event "State of the art in MySQL high availability and replication", including a presentation on the topic by Robert Hodges and Giuseppe Maxia from Continuent, followed by a networking event including beer and snacks.

I wish I could attend that second one as well, but I'll hopefully be back at home by then again...

UPDATE 2012-10-30: The direct link to Google+ Event did not work -  Sorry for the inconvenience. Updated the RSVP instructions accordingly.

It's that time of the year again — the summer holidays are over and the conference season starts!

I'm very excited to be at Oracle Open World in San Francisco again, where I will pretty busy. On Saturday and Sunday I will attend MySQL Connect, primarily to man the Oracle Linux booth in the exhibition area. But I hope to catch some of the talks as well (I shared my favourite sessions with Keith Larson from the MySQL team in this interview). During Open World, I will help out manning the Oracle Linux demo pods in the exhibition grounds in Moscone South, where we will showcase Oracle Linux with Ksplice and related technologies. I also have a joint presentation with two of our customers about "Top Technical Tips for Automatic and Secure Oracle Linux Deployments" and I've prepared two hands-on lab sessions "Oracle Linux Storage Management with LVM and Device-Mapper" and "Oracle Linux Package Management: Configuring and Enabling Services". Both hands-on lab sessions will actually be run twice. The lab sessions were quite popular last year, I look forward to moderating these again.

In November, I'll be at the DOAG Conference in Nuremberg, to give a joint presentation with my colleague Manuel Hossfeld about "Oracle Linux - best practices and benefits" (in German). We also plan to request a slot for a BOF/Unconference about Linux, I'm curious about the feedback and discussions that will arise during these sessions.

If you happen to be around these conferences and would like to meet, please get in touch!

It's conference time again – next week I'll be attending the DOAG Conference in Nuremberg, to speak about Oracle Linux and the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel on Tuesday, 12:00 and the OCFS2 cluster file system on Thursday, 13:00.

In addition to that, me and my colleague Manuel Hossfeld will host an Unconference Session about Oracle Linux and the UEK. The rest of the time I'll be manning a demo pod at our booth and try to attend some sessions myself – the conference program looks very promising!

In my last post, I provided a short review of what I have been working on in the past few months since I joined the Oracle Linux team. Now it's time for a summary of upcoming events! Looking forward, I already have a few more things lined up:

I'll attend and speak at the Oracle OpenWorld 2011 conference in San Francisco in October. I have a joint session with Chris Mason titled Overview: New Features in Oracle Linux 6 where we'll cover the latest developments. I have another joint presentation with my colleague Rob Young from the MySQL product management team titled Using MySQL with Other Oracle Products - this one will give an overview how MySQL has been integrated with the other products in the Oracle portfolio.

At OpenWorld, I'll also do some booth duty (find me at the Oracle Linux demo pods) and I'll also give a number of hands-on lab sessions:

• 30540 - Oracle Linux Package Management: Configuring and Enabling Services
• 30541 - Oracle Linux Storage Management with LVM and Device Mapper

For these labs, I created an Oracle Linux 6.1 VirtualBox appliance and wrote a 70+ page lab manual. I'll be around, aiding the attendees through these exercises.

By the way, a sneak preview of these hands-on labs will be available prior to OpenWorld as well: they are part of an upcoming series of the OTN sysadmin days, free one-day events that will provide practical workshops on both Oracle Solaris and Oracle Linux. We have three days scheduled so far - the first one of these will come up faily soon:

• September 8th: Sacramento (CA)
• September 22nd: Seattle (WA)
• January 18th: Salt Lake City (UT) (no eVite page available yet)

On November 15-17, I'll be at the DOAG 2011 Konferenz + Ausstellung in Nuremberg, Germany. I'll give two presentations (in German):

• Oracle Linux und Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel: Update und Ausblick
• Einführung in das OCFS2 Cluster-Dateisystem für Linux

I'll also hold an "Unconference" (or BOF) about Oracle Linux and the UEK together with Manuel Hossfeld, one of our Linux/OVM consultants.

And finally, I'll be giving a talk about "Oracle Linux and the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel: Status Update and Overview" at the UK Oracle User Group Conference 2011 in Birmingham (UK) on December 6.

If you happen to be at any of these events, please let me know if you'd like to meet!

Despite my best intentions, I haven't posted on this blog for a while, which is a shame! I've become busy writing on so many other places since I moved into my new role in the Oracle Linux product management team in April. I've learned a lot and I am feeling quite at home here! The team is excellent and very nice to work with — I am slowly getting the "Big Picture".

But even though I've been neglecting this blog, there are a lot of things that are publicly visible and document some of my activites:

I've created two podcasts for the Oracle Linux podcasts:

• OCFS2: Features and Benefits
• Latest Btrfs Updates

In addition to working the @ORCL_Linux Twitter account and FaceBook page, I've been blogging on the Oracle Linux blog:

• Linux Filesystem, Storage and Memory Summit
• Follow us on YouTube and Facebook, too!
• Oracle Linux 6.1 has been released
• Oracle Linux 6.1 ISO images now available for download
• First episode of the Oracle Linux Podcast: Sunil Mushran on OCFS2
• New episode of the Oracle Linux Podcast: Chris Mason on Btrfs
• OTN Sys Admin Days - Oracle Solaris and Oracle Linux (Sep. 8th, Sacramento, CA)

From time to time, I'm a guest blogger on the OTN Garage blog:

• Pimp my Ride - Installing Additional Packages on Oracle Linux
• Save disk space on Linux by cloning files on Btrfs and OCFS2

I also created new content and updated pages on the main Oracle web site and the Oracle Technology Network (OTN):

• A new technical white paper about Oracle Linux and the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel
• An article about How to Extract Files from an Oracle Linux RPM Package Without Installing the Package
• Added a new page about our Oracle Linux support offering
• Updated the OCFS2 product page
• Updated the Oracle Linux technical information page.

I've been traveling a bit as well and attended a few conferences where I spoke about Oracle Linux (and MySQL):

• MySQL High Availability at COLLABORATE 11, Orlando (FL), USA
• An introduction to Oracle Linux at the HEPiX Spring 2011 Workshop, Darmstadt, Germany
• What's new in MySQL 5.5 at LinuxTag 2011, Berlin Germany
• Updates on Oracle Linux and Oracle VM at fisl12, Porto Alegre, Brazil

I probably forgot a few things in my reflection of the past few months, but these were some of the highlights.

Check out my followup blog post on what I'm up to in the coming weeks and months!

fisl12 is likely the largest free and open source software event in Latin America. This year, it takes place in Porto Alegre, Brazil, from June 29th to July 2nd. Oracle is a gold sponsor of the event and I will attend it as a speaker. I feel honoured and excited to be there – for me it will be the first visit to the South American continent.

They already have over 3000 registered attendees, so this definitely is going to be a great conference. There is quite a number of well-known names on the speaker roster and I look forward to meeting a lot of familar faces there.

The agenda is still under development but quite impressive already – too bad I don't speak Portuguese...

I will be giving an introduction and status update to Oracle Linux and as our virtualization technologies Oracle VM and Oracle VM VirtualBox. Other Oracle speakers at fisl12 include:

• Davi Arnaut - MySQL Engineering
• Roger Brinkley - Java Evangelists and the Community Leader for the Mobile & Embedded Community
• John Ceccarelli - Middleware Engineering
• Anil Gaur - VP of Java Platform, Enterprise Edition, and GlassFish Server in the Fusion Middleware Group
• Arun Gupta - Java EE and GlassFish evangelist
• Luke Kowalski - VP in the corporate architecture group
• Henrique Leandro - MySQL Support Engineer
• Simon Ritter - Java Technology Evangelist
• Dave Stokes - MySQL Community Manager
• Dalibor Topic - Java F/OSS Ambassador

Linuxtag is likely one of the oldest and largest Linux/OSS events in Germany. I remember having been there to represent SuSE Linux while it still took place at the University of Kaiserslautern, using tables and chairs from the lecture rooms as exhibition stands (this must have been around 1998 or 1999). This year it will take place in Berlin again, and the session schedule looks very promising. I'll be there from Wednesday till Friday and I feel that I will have a hard time deciding which presentations I should attend...

I'll be speaking about What's new in MySQL 5.5 on Friday, 13th of May, at 15:00. If you haven't updated to MySQL 5.5 yet, stop by to hear what new features and improvements have been implemented in this version, which was released in December last year.

In addition to my presentation, there will be two more talks given by Oracle employees:

Wim Coekaerts, SVP of Linux and Virtualization Engineering at Oracle will give the first keynote on Wednesday 11th, 14:00. He'll be talking about Taking Linux into the Clouds — this is a very hot topic and I look forward to this session.

Right afterwards, Dalibor Topic will provide us with an OpenJDK Community Update. If you're a Java developer and you'd like to get the scoop of what's coming, this presentation is one you should not miss!

See you in Berlin!

Update: Leider muß mich meinen Vortrag am Mittwoch aus Gesundheitsgründen absagen — ich bitte die dadurch entstehenden Unannehmlichkeiten zu entschuldigen.

Die Mitglieder der Deutschen ORACLE-Anwendergruppe e.V. (DOAG) organisieren sich auf regionaler Ebene in Regionalgruppen, die in regelmäßigen Abständen auch regionale Treffen organisieren.

Die Regionalgruppe NRW hat für Mittwoch in einer Woche (27.2., ab 17:30) ein Treffen zum Thema Hochverfügbarkeit anberaumt, auf dem ich einen Überblick zum Thema MySQL-Hochverfügbarkeit geben werde. Vor meinem Vortrag gibt es noch eine Präsentation über "Rolling Upgrade einer Oracle 11g Datenbank" von Rainer Klomps.

Veranstaltungsort ist das Hotel Kasserolle in Siegburg, die Teilnahme an diesem Treffen ist kostenlos. Eine Anmeldung ist erforderlich.

It was ready for a while already, but now it's part of the official FOSDEM schedule as well: I am very pleased to announce the presentations and speakers of the MySQL & Friends Developer Room, which will take place this coming Saturday (5th of February) in Brussels, Belgium.

This year, our DevRoom will be located in room H.2213 (in the H Building), which has a capacity of up to 100 people and will be available to us from 13:00-19:00 o'clock. We have 12 sessions lined up, each will last 25 minutes (incl. Q&A). Without further ado, here's our schedule:

Time	Speaker	Session Title
13:00-13:25	Lenz Grimmer	Welcome note / What's new in MySQL 5.5
13:30-13:55	Oli Sennhauser	HandlerSocket and similar technologies - NoSQL for MySQL
14:00-14:25	Steve Hardy	Boosting Enterprise MySQL performance: implementing I/O prefetch for InnoDB
14:30-14:55	Istvan Podor	Over 20,000QPS, XtraDB performance show
15:00-15:25	Istvan Podor	Data Recovery for MySQL
15:30-15:55	Kenny Gryp	Taking Backups With XtraBackup
16:00-16:25	Sergey Petrunya	New query optimizer features in MariaDB
16:30-16:55	Lenz Grimmer	MySQL 5.5 Replication Enhancements: an overview
17:00-17:25	Giuseppe Maxia	Seamless MySQL replication failover with Tungsten
17:30-17:55	Petya Kohts	Multimaster MySQL failover
18:00-18:25	Seppo Jaakola	Multi-Master Replication Approaches
18:30-18:55	Stéphane Combaudon	A practical overview of Maatkit

I would like to thank all speakers for their submissions and for the efforts they are willing to go through in order to make it to this event! If you happen to be at FOSDEM this year, please stop by and join us.

We also plan to head out for a meetup over dinner after the event. If you would like to attend, please register, so we can take you into account! (Thanks a lot for Kenny Gryp for organizing this meetup)

My calendar is filling up with speaking engagements about MySQL at various events quickly. Here is a list of events for the coming months where I'll be present:

• On Wednesday, January 26th, I will be speaking about MySQL High Availability Solutions at the San Francisco MySQL Meetup. I feel honored for having been invited to speak there and I'm quite excited that venue is fully booked! I look forward to meeting so many MySQL users in one place.
• On Saturday, February 5th, I'll be attending and speaking at the MySQL & Friends Developer Room at FOSDEM 2011 in Brussels, Belgium. I helped organizing the DevRoom and preparing the schedule for this event. We have a great lineup of speakers and topics, and I will speak about MySQL 5.5 there. I've been to FOSDEM many times before and it's one of the OSS conferences in Europe that I really enjoy coming back for every year.
• On Thursday, March 24th I'll be in Weimar, Germany, attending the "GUUG-Frühjahrsfachgespräch 2011", a conference organized be the German Unix User Group (GUUG). The topic of my session is MySQL Replication Technologies - an Overview (in German). Erkan, well-known member of the German MySQL community will also be there to talk about "Toolbox MySQL", giving an introduction to the MySQL plugin API and technology.
• Finally on April 10th-14th I will be in Orlando, Florida to attend and speak at COLLABORATE 11. Organized by the Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG), this is a fairly large conference covering a wide range of Oracle Applications and Technologies. This year, they have more than 50 sessions on MySQL, provided by both well-known speakers of the MySQL community as well as Oracle employees. The MySQL talks will be given in one track, which spans from Monday till Thursday. So at least one does not have to choose between several interesting MySQL topics at the same time

If you happen to be around at any of these events, please stop by!

I've also submitted a number of MySQL talks for LinuxTag, which will take place in Berlin, Germany on May 11th-14th. I hope that my proposals are being considered and I would like to encourage you to submit one, too! The call for papers is still open until January 25th and it would be great to have some more MySQL content in the program...

Oh, and don't forget to mark your calendars for MySQL Sunday at Oracle Openworld 2011 later this year (October 2nd-6th)! I unfortunately missed last year's event, but this is going to be the conference with the largest MySQL show, lots of news and updates, and plenty of opportunities for networking. You can already register for the event at a "Super Saver" discount until April, 1st here.

Der Zeitplan des "MySQL & Friends" Developer Rooms auf der FOSDEM steht! Mein Dank gilt allen Vortragenden, die sich die Zeit genommen hatten, Vorschläge einzureichen. Letztendlich mußten wir eine Auswahl treffen, die Agenda ist nun auf dem MySQL Forge Wiki hinterlegt und wird auch in Kürze im offiziellen FOSDEM-Programm zu finden sein. Unter den Vortragenden sind viele bekannte Namen dabei und ich denke, wir haben ein sehr attraktives Programm zusammengestellt.

Gestern erhielt ich die Bestätigung, daß mein Vortragvorschlag für die GUUG Frühjahrsfachgespräche in Weimar im März angenommen wurde. Am Dienstag, den 24.3. um 11:30 werde ich einen Überblick über das Thema MySQL Replikationstechnologien geben. Im Slot davor wird Erkan einen Vortrag mit dem vielversprechenden Titel Baukasten MySQL halten. Ich freue mich schon sehr darauf! Auch der Rest des Vortragsprogramms sieht sehr interessant aus — ich habe viele mir bekannte Namen (besonders aus dem Sun-Umfeld) entdeckt.

Übrigens: der LinuxTag 2011 findet dieses Jahr vom 11.-14. Mai wieder in Berlin statt. Der Call for Papers geht noch bis 25. Januar. Ich habe ein paar Vortragsvorschläge zum Thema MySQL eingereicht, hoffentlich finden sie Zuspruch. Ich würde es auf jeden Fall begrüßen, wenn noch ein paar weitere MySQL-Vorträge von anderen dazukommen

I will be in the Bay Area at the end of this month, to attend a summit of the IOUC (International Oracle Users Group Community), to talk about MySQL and to meet with the organizers of Oracle User Groups worldwide. MySQL is a big topic for many members of their groups, I am looking forward to learn more about their activities and how we can better collaborate in the future. My recent experiences at the DOAG Conference in Nuremberg and the UKOUG Conference in Birmingham were quite positive — I was very pleased by the number of attendees at the MySQL sessions.

Since I'm so close to San Francisco, I gladly accepted the invitation to speak at the San Francisco MySQL Meetup Group on Wednesday, 26th of January. The topic of my talk will be "MySQL High Availability Solutions" where I will try to give a broad overview about the technologies and concepts involved.

Last time I checked, they already had 74 confirmations, the venue can host a maximum of 150 people. So if you'd like to attend and meet, hurry up and sign up soon!

Nur als kleine Erinnerung: bis Sonntag, 26. Dezember können noch Vortragsvorschläge für den "MySQL & Friends" Developer Room auf der FOSDEM in Brüssel abgeben werden. Die FOSDEM-Veranstalter stellen uns für diesen Zweck am Samstag, den 5. Februar von 13:00-17:00 den Raum H.2213 (100 Plätze) zur Verfügung. Wir haben schon eine Reihe interessanter Vorträge erhalten, würden uns aber noch auf weitere Zusendungen freuen! Jeder Vorschlag rund um das Thema MySQL ist willkommen. Pro Vortrag planen wir 20 Minuten Gesprächszeit plus 5 Minuten Diskussion ein, so daß wir insgesamt 12 Vorträge halten können.

Wir freuen uns über weitere Themenvorschläge oder auch Hinweise auf interessante Referenten, die wir noch ansprechen könnten! Vielen Dank.

Hello from Birmingham, UK! I'm here to attend and speak at the UKOUG Technology & E-Business Suite 2010 conference (what a name!) We actually have two packed tracks of MySQL Sessions this Wednesday, including a keynote by Richard Mason (Vice President of MySQL Sales and Consulting at Oracle) about Oracle's strategy and plans for MySQL as well as highly technical sessions about MySQL High Availability, Scalability and Performance tuning from experts in the field. Ronald Bradford, Oracle Ace Director and long-time MySQL community advocate will also be there, speaking about Common MySQL Scalability Mistakes and MySQL idiosyncrasies that BITE. The latter talk is actually going against my own talk about "Making MySQL Administration a Breeze - A Look Into a MySQL DBA's Toolchest". This is going to be interesting!

If you happen to be nearby, don't hesitate to come over! Admission to the MySQL session stream and the exhibition area is free! The online registration has been closed in the meanwhile, but I just learned that you can just turn up on site and the conference team will accommodate you. See you on wednesday!

Yesterday afternoon I returned from the SAPO CodeBits 2010 conference, which took place in Lisbon, Portugal. Just like the previous year, CodeBits has been a great conference to be at and I am grateful for having been selected for participation. Thursday, the first conference day was quite a busy one for me — I gave two presentations in a row:

• What's new in MySQL 5.5? (Slides)
• How to build you own Quadrocopter (Slides)

Afterwards, I also participated in a panel discussion about "To SQL or not to SQL", together with representatives from other open source databases (@fdmanana from CouchDB, @antirez from Redis and @bpedro for PostgreSQL). It was an interesting but somewhat slow discussion and the overall conclusion is still the same: there's more than one tool for a given job, choose carefully what your requirements are and don't just blindly believe the hype.

On Friday, I had some more time to attend other people's presentations. In the evening I took part in another panel discussion about Physical Computing. I also had the "opportunity" to try one of the Nuclear Tacos (Video) they served — I have never had something that hot before. Ouch! Fortunately my tastebuds recovered in time for the speaker's dinner, which took place later that evening. We went to a Rodizio restaurant nearby, the food was plenty and delicious!

Saturday was a pretty low activity day for me. I spent some time in the DIY corner, doing some Arduino hacking. Later that day I attended the project presentations and the closing keynote. Unfortunately a majority of the content was in Portuguese, so I only got parts of the content. But it was still fun! I've published my pictures of CodeBits on Flickr, I hope you enjoy them

Later today, I will be travelling to the DOAG Conference 2010 in Nuremberg, Germany. I'll be giving two talks (in German) there on Wednesday, 17th:

• MySQL Replikationstechnologien - eine Übersicht
• Blick in die Werkzeug-Kiste eines MySQL-DBAs

I already received my speaker badge for this conference (see the picture below). Cool idea: you can use the public transport facilities (Buses, Trams) for free, by presenting this card!

There will also be a MySQL Community Meetup on Tuesday, 19:00 at the Press Center of the Congress Center East. If you're around, you're more than welcome to join us there!

Next up in the conference schedule for this year is the UKOUG Conference in Birmingham, UK (Nov. 29th - Dec. 1st). We helped them with setting up a MySQL session stream, and they've created an interesting lineup of talks. I'll be speaking about Making MySQL Administration a Breeze - A Look Into a MySQL DBA's Toolchest. See you there!