Lenz Grimmer's blog

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

The organizers described this year's event as follows:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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.

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

On early Tuesday morning, I made a quick trip to Paris, France, to attend and speak at the Solutions Linux / Open Source 2009 Conference. I've never been to this conference before and was quite surprised about its size - it's actually the largest Open Source event in France and it reminded me a lot of LinuxTag in Germany. Many well-known vendors (e.g. Sun, Novell, Canonical, Bull, etc.) were exhibiting. The also was a large "DotOrg" section for various Open Source projects and I was very happy to see that LeMUG.fr, the official MySQL User Group of France, had a table there, too! A big Thank You goes to Pascal Borghino, who manned that table on his own most of the time and answered questions about MySQL. I walked around the exhibition floor and took some pictures, which I have now posted to my Flickr account.

In addition to the exhibition, there were several parallel tracks with sessions. I was invited to speak about MySQL HA Solutions in the "Aquarium". Unfortunately I had the last slot at that day and they were running a bit behind schedule, so I had only 15-20 people in the audience. But I still had a great time and I received several positive comments about my presentation. I travelled back home early the next day - I wish I had scheduled some more time to attend the conference. I look forward to going there again next year, it was a nice event.

At this year's CeBit 2009 trade fair, there was a dedicated exhibition area called the Open Source Forum. In addition to providing booths for various Open Source projects, they also had a stage for presentations about different topics. Every talk was recorded and available as a live stream during the show.

My dear colleague Simon Phipps spoke about "Adoption-Led: The Third Wave of Open Source" on Wednesday, I gave a presentation about "MySQL Backup and Security Best Practices" on Friday. The recording of these and all other talks as well as the Linux New Media Award ceremony are now available from the archives. Enjoy!

My calendar for the upcoming months is already filling up with conferences, trade fairs and other events at which I'll speak about MySQL. Here's a quick overview:

• This coming Thursday at 15:00 CET, I'll be speaking about "Backing up MySQL using file system snapshots" at the MySQL University. The session will be hosted live using DimDim, which is a great online conferencing and presentation system (Flash required). Attendance is free, so come and join me if you want to learn more about this backup technique!
• On Friday, 6th of March at 15:15 I'll give a presentation about "MySQL Backup and Security" in the CeBit Open Source Forum in Hannover, Germany. By the way, Sun will have a large presence themed "Open Source for Open Minds" in Hall 6, Booth E36. There'll be a MySQL info pod as well, which I will help manning from Friday until Sunday, 8th. So make sure to stop by and say hello!
• On March 23-24, there'll be a PHP/MySQL Conference in Warsaw, Poland, organized by IDG. I submitted three talks about various MySQL topics, currently I am still waiting for the confirmation which of these they selected.
• On April 20-23, there is of course the MySQL Conference & Expo in Santa Clara, to which I am very much looking forward to. I'm helping to organize the DotOrg Pavilion in the exhibition hall and will likely give a BoF about a project I'm currently involved in.
• In May 4-5 there is the AMOOCON in Rostock, Germany, which is a conference about Open Source VoIP and communication. I'll talk about "MySQL High Availability Solutions" and "Backup & Security Best Practices" (in German). My colleague Geert will be there as well, giving an in-depth talk about MySQL Cluster.

There is a number of additional events in the pipeline, I'll blog about these once my session proposals have been accepted.

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

While VirtualBox is available as a downloadable OpenSolaris package from the download page at virtualbox.org, I find it much more convenient to use the Package Manager GUI or pkg on the command line to install and update packages.

Sun provides a VirtualBox IPS package (and some others like Flash Player) from a separate "extras" repository. However, you need to obtain a key and SSL certificate before you can access this repository, which are available for free from https://pkg.sun.com/register/ after logging in with your Sun Online Account.

Once you obtained and installed these files in /var/pkg/ssl (detailed instructions are provided on the download page), you can add this repository as another "authority" and start looking at what packages are provided:

$ pfexec pkg set-authority \
            -k /var/pkg/ssl/OpenSolaris_extras.key.pem \
            -c /var/pkg/ssl/OpenSolaris_extras.certificate.pem \
            -O https://pkg.sun.com/opensolaris/extra extra
$ pkg list -a 'pkg://extra/*'
NAME (AUTHORITY)                              VERSION         STATE      UFIX
SUNWadmj (extra)                              0.5.11-0.101    known      ----
SUNWjsnmp (extra)                             0.5.11-0.101    known      ----
SUNWwbapi (extra)                             0.5.11-0.101    known      ----
SUNWwbcou (extra)                             0.5.11-0.101    known      ----
SUNWwbdev (extra)                             0.5.11-0.101    known      ----
virtualbox (extra)                            2.0.6-0.101     known      ----
virtualbox/kernel (extra)                     2.0.6-0.101     known      ----
web/firefox/plugin/flash (extra)              9.0.125-0.101   known      ----

So there is not that much to download by now - some additional Java packages and the Flash plugin for Firefox. There is no package for VirtualBox 2.1.0 yet, but I hope this will be updated soon...

The FOSDEM 2009 organizers have been very kind to us this year: in addition to a Developer Room on Sunday, we now also have a project desk (1 table) on both days! Thank you very much! In summary, this means that there will be the following MySQL-related activities:

• We will have a Project Stand (one table) on both days
• On Sunday, we will have a MySQL Developer Room, allowing us to schedule our own track of talks about MySQL and related projects
• I have been invited to give a talk about "MySQL High Availability Solutions" in the main conference track
• I also submitted two proposals for lightning talks ("What's new in MySQL 5.1" and "Why you should use Bazaar for maintaining your OSS project") (pending approval)

In addition to employees from Sun/MySQL, we would also like to encourage and invite members of the MySQL Community to contribute to making the MySQL project's presence a success. We are looking for your support and contribution! Here is how you can help:

Give a talk about MySQL in the developer room

The MySQL Developer Room will be open on Sunday, 8th of February, from 9:00-17:00. We would like to set up a schedule of talks related to MySQL. As the audience will mostly be developers and DBAs, we are looking for in-depth technical sessions about the MySQL Server and related projects/tools (e.g Cluster, Proxy, Connectors, etc.). Each session will last for 45 minutes, followed by 15 minutes of Q&A.

If you would be interested in giving a talk, please submit your proposal via this page now! The deadline for proposing a talk is January 15th, 2009. We look forward to your submission!

After the call for papers has been closed, we will comment and vote on all proposals and will get back to you about further details!

Record/transcribe sessions

For people that could not make it to FOSDEM or some of the sessions, it would be nice to be able to provide video recordings or transcriptions (e.g. live blogging) from these talks. We're looking for volunteers to record the sessions! If you have a video camera or are an expert blogger, we'd like to hear from you.

Help us manning the project stand

We are also looking for MySQL users that are willing and excited to talk about MySQL to other people and would like to assist us with manning our project desk. Your task would be to be present at the project table, talk with other users and developers about all things MySQL, hand out merchandise (in case we get some) and marketing material as well as providing them with additional useful information (e.g. links to further information, contact information).

So if you are a MySQL enthusiast and plan to attend FOSDEM, consider sparing at least two hours and join us to man the table! I've set up a quick registration form in which you can leave your name, contact information and times you would be available. We will then get back to you about further details. Thank you!

Contact / Mailing list

To facilitate the organization and for further discussion, please join our public Community mailing list! I've also set up a Wiki page on the MySQL Forge to track and document our FOSDEM 2009 activities. I am looking forward to your feedback and suggestions!

It has not hit the MySQL DevZone Frontpage yet, but I just finished an interview with Adam Donnison, one of our web gurus behind the mysql.com web site.

Adam talks about what his work environment looks like, his experiences with MySQL 5.1 on the MySQL web sites and why he enjoys working for a virtual organization like ours. Enjoy!

I recently installed the last  release candidate version of OpenSolaris 2008.11 (ISO image available from here) and I am happy to note that the audiohd driver now supports the Intel soundchip (82891H) in my Lenovo Thinkpad T61 out of the box! This was one of the glitches I observed with 2008.05. In general, I am very impressed by the OpenSolaris driver support for this particular laptop - everything except for bluetooth is supported now. On the downside, suspending to RAM still fails for me, but I have not looked into this very deeply yet.

But what good is a working sound driver, if you don't have apps that produce sounds? Be default, the media players included in the distribution lack support for most codecs, e.g. MP3 or video formats. This is not much different from most Linux distributions, as these codecs are usually protected by patents or proprietary licenses which require the user to install these separately. Here are some hints on how to enable better multimedia support on OpenSolaris.

The Observatory has a detailed article on how to add the free MP3 gstreamer codec from Fluendo, so all applications that use the gstreamer API (e.g. Songbird) will be able to play back MP3 files.

If you want full multimedia support and an choice of video players/codecs, you should add the Life With Solaris (LWS) package repository to the package manager:

$ pfexec pkg set-authority -O http://pkg.lifewithsolaris.jp:10000/ pkg.lifewithsolaris.jp
$ pfexec packagemanager

You will now be able to choose a new package repository from the dropdown list, which allows you to select players and codecs for download/installation. The packages will be installed in /opt/LWS, so you need to add /opt/LWS/bin to your $PATH, if you want to start the applications from the command line. But the packages will create menu entries for the GNOME desktop as well.

Enjoy!

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).

This year's Systems trade fair will take place from October 21st-24th in Munich, Germany. Sun will be present there with a stand in the exhibition area (Hall B2, Stand 329) and we also sponsor a conference themed "Perspective Open Source" that will provide half-day sessions (in German) about opensource-related topics throughout the week.

Some highlights of what we'll present on our stand:

• MySQL
• Sun Fire Servers (with Intel Xeon Processors)
• Open Storage
• VirtualBox
• StarOffice/OpenOffice
• Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) for SMBs

By the way, we have a limited contingent of free day passes for the fair - see this page if you're interested to get one!

I will be there to help manning the MySQL demo pod on all days. See you there!

Greetings from the University of Latvia in Riga, where the local activities related to Software Freedom Day 2008 are in full swing! We've just finished the introductionary talk "Software freedom in Latvia"  by Evijs Taube (LATA) and Leo Trukšāns (Linux Centre). Currently, Mark Callaghan from Google Inc. is talking about "Running a database when your business depends on it". We've more talks scheduled for the rest of the day and there also is an ongoing workshop about MySQL Performance tuning by Jay Pipes, which takes place in the University's Linux Lab. The full agenda is published on the MySQL Forge Wiki and I just published a first batch of pictures on my gallery. Enjoy!