I just uploaded my slides from my Open DB Camp / Froscon talk to Slideshare:
PlanetMySQL Voting: Vote UP / Vote DOWN
Speaking of conferences, in general, and OpenSQLCamps in particular, there is one a week from now, and I will be speaking! It is organized as a single room track at Froscon, Germany, by Felix Schupp (Blackray/Softmethod) and Volker Oboda (Primebase). The content is mostly a collection of database related talks originally submitted via the main Froscon call for papers. (In other words, unlike many previous camps, the schedule is all set.)
I'm a little excited about this one, because for the first time in my career as speaker I will be giving the keynote. The title of my talk is
How I learned to use SQL and how I learned not to use it
With OpenSQL Camp and FrOSCon being over for almost a week now, it's time to come up with a short summary. I traveled home on Monday morning and then took Tuesday off, so I had some catching up to do...
As for the past years, FrOSCon rocked again! According to the closing keynote, they had around 1.500 (unique) visitors and I had a great time there. I really enjoyed meeting all the old and new faces of the various Open Source communities. The lineup of speakers was excellent, Jon "maddog" Hall's keynote about "Free and Open Source Software in the Developing World" was quite insightful and inspiring.
Most of the time I was busy with speaking at and running the OpenSQL Camp session track in room "HS6", but I managed to sneak out and listen to a few other talks as well. Additionally, I gave a presentation about ZFS on Linux, which had a good crowd and some interesting discussions.
This year, all of the sessions in the main lecture halls were streamed live, so people not able to attend could at least get a glimpse on what was going on these two days. Many times it was a really tough decision to make – there were way too many good sessions going in parallel. So being able to see the recording afterwards somewhat relieved that pain. The FrOSCon team has already begun to publish the video files – they are separated by day and lecture room and can be obtained from http://froscon.tv/.
And we were really lucky with the weather, too - the weekend was warm and sunny, a perfect setting for the social event, which is one of the highlights of FrOSCon. Impressive: this year, the attendees consumed one cubic meter (1000 liters) of Beer!
Finally, I'd like to express my special gratitude to all the speakers of OpenSQL Camp – thank you very much for your support and for devoting your time to participate in our subconference! It was appreciated.
Around these days last year I presented `securich` for the first time. It was at froscon 2009, barely knowing anybody, spending my 27th birthday in a hostel in Germany fixing some bugs before the actual presentation on a 10 inch netbook (my mac had some problems at the time but thats another story :)). I got a beating, verbally of course! Many of the people listening to the presentation were expecting something else since another presentation was supposed to be running at that time, some even started dozing off (encouraging? not really hehe) but after a few minutes people started getting interested and asking all kind of questions. “This awesome” I thought to myself, “questions are good, it means people are understanding and want to know more”, but the more they learnt the more they realised how young securich was as a tool, lacking fundamental features like reverse reconciling securich with mysql rather than the other way round, bugs cropping up (Giuseppe aka datacharmer made sure he found some on the fly :P) but oh well back then it was just four months old.
Now after a year and four months into it, Securich is still in Beta but MANY MANY more features were included, bugs fixed (others created) and it even made it through two sessions at the Oreilly MySQL Conference and Expo 2010 and two mysql university sessions.
The end points here are:
1. Share your knowledge and code with the community, we learn, you learn!
2. When you fall to the ground, climb back up and get on your feet again. Start running!
3. Securich is now at version 0.3.0 (10th official release), help yourself at google code your feedback is greatly appreciated!
Most of the new release is bug fixes but some of the features added in this version are:
1. Any user can now install securich not just mysql root
2. You can now grant privileges on the mysql db (by default still disabled as it runs in “strict” mode which needs to be changed to “lenient” manually)
3. The installation script now keeps the securich package intact for further many installations
4. Better error reporting (for debugging purposes)
5. Grants on tables using regexp are now case sensitive
In just two days the OpenSQL Camp Europe (hosted by the excellent FrOSCon) will kick off!
We've had a few last-minute changes to the schedule, as some speakers could not make it due to visa or family issues. But we managed to keep all slots filled on both days and I think we've come up with a very nice program! In addition to the two sessions I already had, I've volunteered to take over Giuseppe's talk about Shooting from the Hip. MySQL at the Command Line.
The most up-to-date version of the schedule is on the OpenSQL Camp Wiki, I expect the remaining changes to be reflected on the FrOSCon schedule during the day as well.
I would like to express my special gratitude to the folks at Percona, who really did their utmost in order to find replacement speakers for their accepted talks.
I look forward to this weekend. And if you're interested to attend: I still have a few vouchers for free admission to the conference left over. Please contact me directly if you'd like to get one – first come, first serve! See you on Saturday!
Oh time is flying! - This weekend it is already time for FrOSCon, the Free and Open source Conference in St. Augustin close to Western Germany's former capitol Bonn. The conference consists out of a main track and different side tracks, like the PHP developer room and the OpenSQL sub-conference.
In the PHP developer room I will give an overview over things that happened at MySQL, especially in regards to PHP in recent times. My colleague Ulf Wendel will then go and talk about plugins to mysqlnd - the MySQL native driver for PHP - in detail.
In the OpenSQL Camp track you can find other interesting MySQL related talks which will, unfortunately, not leave you with enough time to watch all the interesting talks of the other tracks. And that all for an entrance fee of just 5€! So if you have a chance: Go there and say hi!

If you wonder why there hasn't been an update from me for quite a while — I just returned from two months of paternal leave, in which I actually managed to stay away from the PC most of the time. In the meanwhile, I've officially become an Oracle employee and there is a lot of administrative things to take care of... But it feels good to be back!
During my absence, Giuseppe and Felix kicked off the Call for Papers for this year's European OpenSQL Camp, which will again take place in parallel to FrOSCon in St. Augustin (Germany) on August 21st/22nd. We've received a number of great submissions, now we would like to ask our community about your favourites!
Basically it's "one vote per person per session" and you can cast your votes in two ways, either by twittering @opensqlcamp or via the opensqlcamp mailing list. The procedure is outlined in more detail on this wiki page.
As we need to finalize the schedule and inform the speakers, the voting period will close this coming Sunday, 18th of July. So don't hesitate, cast your votes now! Based on your feedback we will compile the session schedule for this year's camp. Thanks for your help!

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):
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):

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:
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!
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 got to meet, and share a meal with a most interesting Darren Cassar at FRoSCon/OpenSQLCamp, who’s the mastermind behind SecuRich. Some sparse notes, while we await his slides. I think there’s some great potential here, and SecuRich is exciting and should be given some more love.
Designed to work with Sybase and MySQL in mind (because he’s hacking on migrating Sybase to MySQL).
How often do we audit user privileges and access levels? How often do we forget temporary elevated privileges?
What you have in MySQL today: Authentication against ‘username’@'hostname’, and the password is hashed by PASSWORD() function. There is wide range of privileges, and the granting of privileges is controlled.
What are limitations in MySQL today: Password limits are not available (password size limit, password history, password complexity meter, password minimum age), its quite complex to manage, there are no roles, it is easily unsecured (if you provide an access to the MySQL database, you can try brute force attacks, etc.). Once you drop the database, the grants are still there – obsolete grants are not removed.
SECURICH has password limits, reduces complexity to manage, has roles, is a lot more secured, and soon, there will be removal of obsolete grants.
Compatible with MySQL 5.0 and later, as it uses INFORMATION_SCHEMA extensively. It requires I_S.processlist, which is only available in MySQL 5.1 though.
I don’t see why this wouldn’t work on Windows, besides some scripts written in BASH. My only experience with this is however on Linux and OSX.
This is the Sharding for the masses: Introducing the SPIDER storage engine by Giuseppe Maxia, given at OpenSQLCamp, at FrOSCon, in August 2009. These are somewhat live notes, and the slides are available too.
Why sharding? Scaling, of course. The MySQL way to solve this, is replication (even Yahoo! and Google use this).
When the master doesn’t have enough resources to cope with what you do (i.e. large data sets), replication chokes.
You can use proxies for sharding. There exists MySQL Proxy (can be programmed using a scripting language – Lua), HSCALE (built on top of MySQL Proxy), SpockProxy (a fork of MySQL Proxy, without LUA scripting, specialised for sharding), in the market these days. This however, is the single point of failure – everything has to pass through one proxy.
Enter SPIDER – a MySQL storage engine, built on top of the partitions engine. It associates a partition with a remote server, and is transparent to the user. Its developed by Kentoku Shiba.
Installation: Get 5.1.37 sources, then get the source code for Spider 1.0, and then get the patch for condition pushdown.
Why the condition pushdown patch? Remote server works less, by receiving the condition. The SPIDER engine without the condition pushdown patch is still fast, but it can be more than 10x faster with condition pushdowns.
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/condition-pushdown-optimization.html (works with NDBCLUSTER), http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.4/en/condition-pushdown-optimization.html (works with MyISAM). The patch by Kentoku, will add cond_push and cond_pop, to ha_partition – so now, every storage engine that uses table partitioning can get condition pushdown through ha_partition.
You need to setup the engine first: http://datacharmer.org/downloads/spider_setup.sql (the SQL is also available in the DOCS).
spider_remote_employees.sql – use this in conjunction with http://launchpad.net/test-db/ – a good example of how to use the SPIDER storage engine.