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As a member of the the conference committee I review the session and tutorial proposals for the Percona Live MySQL conference in Santa Clara, 2012.

The sessions are expected to be technical, and I'm happy the proposals follow this guideline. I use Giuseppe's and Baron's general guidelines for submitting a proposal. I wish to humbly add a couple notes myself.

Be fairly brief

Explain your session/tutorial as clearly as you can. The reader should be able to get the general impression of the session from two or three paragraphs. Some can make a point in two sentences; for most it would take somewhat more.

If you're going to talk about some database feature, for example, please do not write the manual for that feature. That's for the session itself. Just explain how you're going to discuss the feature, and why it should be of interest (e.g. what the benefits of this feature are, the risks or pitfalls, the ingenious C code behind it or the quirks of the operating system involved).

Clarify

It's important for me to understand two things when reading a proposal, which establish the grounds for better evaluating the proposal:

• Who the target audience is (newbies, developers, DBAs, Linux internal experts etc.)
• To what depth are you going to deliver the content you describe.

That is not to say you should explicitly state "This session is for MySQL DBAs", but the attendee should be able to easily decide whether your session appeals to his type of work or expertise. I, myself, have happened upon sessions that were completely different from what I expected. To illustrate, I give two examples, while not disclosing the exact details:

• A session which was about locking in database. I got the impression it was about ways to avoid locking, issues with mutexes etc. It turned out to be a discussion between the presenter and a few member of the audience about the specific code internals, lines 667-684 in the lock_module.cc file, and the recently reported bug. To me it was more like the weekly rnd meeting of some company. I couldn't understand anything of the entire talk.
• A session promising insight on working out great scale-out with some product: I was expecting to hear of the "DOs and DON'Ts", or of great configuration and implementation tricks on the subject. However, it turned out to be more of a general talk on "how we used the product in our company and found it to work great".

The two sessions above were perfectly valid, and had their place in the conference. But were poorly described in the two respects I mentioned.

A great submission, in my opinion, is one where attendees get what the expect, and don't shyly leave the conference room 15 minutes into the talk.

Submit a proposal here.

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I have a bunch of notes from the O’Reilly MySQL Conference & Expo 2011, and I figure its about time I started blogging it. These are notes from the panel on the SkySQL Reference Architecture, led by Kaj Arno and Ivan Zoratti. The notes are raw (read their FAQ for more), and I talk a little bit about the SkySQL Configurator at the end (a tool I immediately used, and submitted some bugs/improvements for – 7 at last count, which I hear got fixed in the 0.02 release, which got pushed last night!).

There were 7 panelists. The MySQL world needs:

SkySQL Provisioning tools:

• SkySQL Manager – control and administer the SkySQL/MySQL environment
• SkySQL Configurator – configure and update SkySQL reference architecture modules
• SkySQL Tuner – analyse the configuration and prepare the packages

I did a test, and it seemed like I got binaries built in under 5 minutes. Custom configurations with a stock build. You get a 70MB binary. Hosted at http://www.enovance.com/. A lot of people never configure their my.cnf, so I think having a GUI on the web might be a good idea to help people have sensible defaults.

lovegood:skysql byte$ ls
total 143352
drwxr-xr-x    3 byte  staff       102 14 Apr 06:13 ./
drwx------@ 598 byte  staff     20332 14 Apr 06:13 ../
-rw-r--r--@   1 byte  staff  73395132 14 Apr 06:12 SkySQL-mariadb-poboffcfrm5bi054559q8iea74.tar.gz

lovegood:skysql byte$ tar -zxvpf SkySQL-mariadb-poboffcfrm5bi054559q8iea74.tar.gz
x etc/
x etc/my.cnf
x install
x packages/
x packages/xtrabackup-1.4-74.rhel5.x86_64.rpm
x packages/MySQL-client-5.5.10-1.rhel5.x86_64.rpm
x packages/MySQL-server-5.5.10-1.rhel5.x86_64.rpm

SkySQL is also going to have a customer advisory board, and they are starting it this week. (I don’t know any further details about this as of yet.)

The SkySQL Configurator can only get better. I expect it will do custom packages including things like Sphinx/SphinxSE, Drizzle, and other things in due time.

Related posts:

1. O’Reilly MySQL Conference & Expo 2011 – register now to save!
2. Services Oriented Architecture with PHP and MySQL
3. Federation at Flickr: A tour of the Flickr Architecture

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Having the conference behind now, I’m reviewing some of my impressions and of sessions I attended.

The people

To begin with, this conference was a big success for me, in many respects. The sessions were great (more on that later), but of course, meeting with new people and with familiar people, was the more important part.

I live in Israel, which makes travel to the US very long and expensive. Apparently not many MySQL community members in my neighborhood, so I don’t ever get to meet the faces. The conference makes that possible. I did not participate in all community events, as I had scheduled calls with little girls who miss their father. And I was very much under jet lag. And I have more excuses on demand.

But I did get to meet known faces; people I only knew by name; unfamiliar people who were familiar with my work (fun!); and otherwise just (ex-)strangers.

The sessions

There was a variety of sessions to choose from. Many times, I had to pick one out of two or three sessions I was interested in, running at the same time. Not all sessions appeal to one in the same way, but looking back, I find there were a lot of GOOD sessions I attended. I mostly like sessions that are very technical; preferably drilling into details of algorithms & implementation.

I wish to review some of the sessions I attended. I can’t possibly review them all, so my apologies to those I left out.

Monday

• Learn how to cure MySQL replication deprivation with Tungsten! / Robert Hodges (Continuent.com), Edward Archibald (Continuent)

This is actually the first time I learned about the internal details of Tungsten. Robert, CEO of Continuent & original developer of Tungsten, did an excellent job in reviewing the various aspects of Tungsten. But rather than being a promotional talk, this was a purely technical tutorial.

So it was interesting to understand the difficulties in building Tungsten, at least on the MySQL part. For example, the Tungsten replicator must do its own filtering of events based on server id, since, although a replicating slave knows how to ignore circular queries issues by itself, there is no client API to do so; you can’t “send over” the server id along with a query and expect the server to ignore it.

As seems to be the current and emerging paradigm, parallel replication is possible by paralleling queries from different schemata. But apparently Continuent seem to want to change that. That is, there’s nothing that strictly forces that this must be the paradigm; it’s just the current implementation.

Giuseppe was in charge of live demos, and has shown stuff like slave disconnect, fail over, multi-master replication etc. Edward Archibald later presented a cluster-like solution based on Tungsten and a replication aware connection proxy.

There was plenty of time for asking questions. Interesting technical issues were discussed and answered. It was also stated very clearly what Tungsten does not do for you, or when it may actually be the gun with which you shoot yourself in the foot. Good talk!

Tuesday

• MQL-to-SQL: a JSON-based Puery Language for RDBMS Access from AJAX Applications / Roland Bouman (XCDSQL Solutions / Strukton Rail)

Roland is now passionate about finding an easier query language for web applications to use. Rather than SQL, he suggests using MQL (created by Freebase). MQL uses JSON (-like) syntax to describe both queries (requests) and result sets (responses). I won’t go into the details since Roland himself laid them out on his blog.

As usual with Roland, his session is well thought of. He describes an elegant, appealing syntax. In my opinion, MQL is an intuitive language. It is easily comprehensible by both DBAs and developers. Possibly by my mother.

However Roland goes further and offers his MQL-to-SQL, an open source implementation of a translation tool between the two languages. In his presentation, he demonstrated some simple and some not-so-simple queries, generated by MSQL, translated to SQL, the results of which translated back to MQL.

MQL is not an all-purpose solution. You don’t do analytics with MQL, but it does seem to answer some problems that other ORMs (e.g. Django) are, to the best of my knowledge, unable to perform in convenient manner (that is, without reverting to some SQL-like syntax).

Special thanks

Thanks to Giuseppe Maxia, when on MySQL Replication Advanced Techniques he presented some of the openark kit tools, and, having located me in the crowd, invited me to speak.

To be continued

I need to prepare for my flight. Will probably publish next part(s) once back home. Hope to see you all next year!

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I just received a confirmation that my presentation proposal for the MySQL user conference 2011 was accepted! The title for my proposal is MQL-to-SQL: a JSON-based Query Language for RDBMS Access from AJAX Applications, and it covers pretty much everything implied by the title.

As always, the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Santa Clara, California serves as the venue. The conference will be held from April 11-14. Except for the venue and period, I think this year's conference will bear few similarities to previous editions. Let me try and explain.

This year's theme is "MySQL, the ecosystem and Beyond". This means that the conference is using MySQL as an anchor for a myriad of topics which are of interest to a large majority of MySQL users. This explicitly leaves room for subjects that may not be directly related to the MySQL product proper.

So, not only products with a direct link to MySQL, such as drizzle and MariaDB are covered; NoSQL databases like CouchDB, MongoDB and Cassandra are quite well represented and the conference committee actively reached out to the PostgreSQL community to submit proposals. Traditional topics like scalability, performance and tuning remain strongly present, just like high availability, failover, and replication. As always, some of the world experts in this field will be speaking. In addition, infrastructural topics like virtualization and cloud computing are well represented (but of course, especially with regard to database management); One of the things I'm thrilled about is the presence of developer and applicattion centric topics like GIS, rapid application development, and object relational mapping.

Just take a look at the full schedule to get a taste of what this event will be offering. Personally, I think it's a great setup, and I'm happy and honored to attend!

In a series of upcoming blog posts, I plan to explain some of the subject matter regarding my own talk. But for now, I just want to tell you that I think this is going to be a great conference! I'm looking forward to attending a lot of high quality sessions, and meeting world leading experts in the MySQL and open source database ecosystem. I hope to see you there!
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O’Reilly’s 2011 edition of the MySQL conference has an expanded agenda, with good representation from Postgres, CouchDB, MongoDB, and others. Take a look at the full schedule listing, which is being filled out as talks are approved and the speakers verify that they’ll give the session.

I am certainly looking forward to this year’s event. A tremendous amount of progress has landed in GA versions of open-source databases this year. To name just a couple, there’s a new version of Postgres (9.0) with built-in replication and many more improvements; there’s MySQL 5.5 GA; there’s the HandlerSocket NoSQL interface to MySQL; Drizzle has a beta release; and the list goes on. I believe that this conference will have balanced and representative coverage of what’s really important to users. It isn’t dominated by any vendor this year; O’Reilly is running the conference independently, and the committee members represent a broad spectrum of databases themselves.

In short, I am happier than I’ve ever been about this great and unique conference. It’s definitely going to be the best year so far. Thank you O’Reilly for holding it, and thank you to all the great speakers, and thanks to all the companies who sponsor the event.

Related posts:

1. Postgres folks, consider the 2011 MySQL conference
2. O’Reilly MySQL 2011 conference CfP is open
3. I’ll be speaking at the O’Reilly MySQL Conference 2010
4. O’Reilly MySQL Conference CfP ends today
5. High Performance MySQL Second Edition Schedule

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I don’t think this was widely publicized, but the Call for Proposals for the MySQL (and beyond) conference was extended a few days. It’ll be open through November 3rd.

Related posts:

1. O’Reilly MySQL Conference CfP ends today
2. Postgres folks, consider the 2011 MySQL conference
3. How to use extended properties as documentation with sp_showdoc
4. The MySQL Conference will be very good this year
5. Like it or not, it is the MySQL Conference and Expo

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At this year’s conference, I was pleasantly surprised with the high level of interest in Open Query’s proactive services for MySQL and MariaDB, and specifically our focus on preventing problems, while explicitly not offering emergency services.

I’ll describe what this is about first, and why I reckon it’s interesting. When you think about it, most IT related support that includes emergency (24×7) operates similar to this:

You have a house that has the front and back doors wide open with no locks, and you take out an insurance policy for the house contents. After a short time you call the insurance company “guess what, the most terrible thing happened, my TV got stolen.” Insurance company responds “that’s dreadful, you poor soul, let us fix it all up for you with getting a new TV and installing it. It’ll be our pleasure to serve you.” A few weeks later you call the insurance company again “guess what …” and they help you in the same fabulous way.

You get the idea, it’s rather silly because it’s very predictable. If you leave your doors open, you’re very close to actually being the cause of the problem yourself and insurance companies tend to not cover you under such circumstances – yet most IT support arrangements do. If IT support were actually run like insurance, premiums would be based on a risk assessment, and consequentially most companies would have to pay much higher premiums.

Much of this is actually about company processes as much as the technical setup. Depending on how you arrange things in your business, you can actually be very “emergency prone”. Since company processes are notoriously hard to change, many businesses operate in a way that is fundamentally not suitable for Open Query to do business with. That’s a fact and we’re fine with it, the market is big enough. We have clients all around the world, but so far very few from Silicon Valley. My presumption was that this was due to the way those businesses are often set up, making them simply incompatible for our services. But a significant number of companies we spoke with at and around the conference were very interested in our services exactly because of the way we work, and so that to me was interesting news. A good lesson, making attending the conference extra worthwhile. It’s also a good vote of confidence in the way we’ve set up our service offering.

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The O’Reilly MySQL Conference & Expo 2010 is over. I hope all of you had a good time. I have plenty of blog posts and thoughts lined up about this, but first, I’d like to point out something that has become a tradition, that was continued in 2010: the O’Reilly MySQL Conference Community Award Winners.

Tim O’Reilly was kind enough to hand out the awards this year. In case people were wondering, the awards were pewter wine goblets from Royal Selangor.

Selection of the award winners happened via voting from the alumni of winners, and was all done in a rather short period of time. Kudos to the entire team that voted. Now for the winners…

O’Reilly MySQL Community Member of the Year 2010

1. Mark Callaghan is known for his work in leading a MySQL engineering team first at Google, and now at Facebook. In addition, the panel appreciated his insightful and always tasteful blogging, ranging from insightful benchmark reports to open source community advocacy.
2. Kai ‘Oswald’ Seidler is a developer of XAMPP, a multi-platform LAMP stack, especially popular amongst Microsoft Windows users. Many users get their first contact with the AMP (Apache-MySQL-PHP) platform using XAMPP!
3. Daniel Nichter created the Hack MySQL Kit, hacks on Maatkit and heaps of other software. He’s also a fabulous MySQL DBA.

O’Reilly MySQL Application of the Year 2010
Twitter was unanimously voted to be the application of the year in 2010.

Panellist Marc Delisle described his use of Twitter recently:

“Seven weeks ago I was in Niamey, Niger during the coup d’état. While borders and the airport were closed and a tank was patrolling on my street, I took refuge at the Canadian embassy where Twitter users updated me on the situation, almost minute by minute.”

O’Reilly MySQL Corporate Sponsor of the year 2010

1. Rackspace received the award for hiring many of the core Drizzle developers, enabling them to work full-time on the MySQL fork. Rackspace also contributes to open source projects like MariaDB, Drizzle and more, providing hosting.
2. Percona has over the last years hired many valuable MySQL contributors, and have a lot of consultants and developers extending MySQL and tools around it. Percona’s team blog on MySQL performance is also highly regarded within the community.

Another picture from the excellent James Duncan Davidson:

Related posts:

1. o’reilly mysql conference & expo 2010
2. MySQL Conference Updates – The day before
3. MySQL Conference Update: Grid is up, go promote and register!

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Here’s a sneak peek at a video matrix — this is all the videos that include Pythian Group employees at the MySQL conference. I hope to have all the rest of the videos processed and uploaded within 24 hours, with a matrix similar to the one below (but of course with many more sessions).

Title	Presenter	Slides	Video link (hr:min:sec)	Details (Conf. site link)
Main Stage
Keynote: Under New Management: Next Steps for the Community	Sheeri K. Cabral (Pythian)	N/A	18:16	session 14808
Ignite talk: MySQLtuner 2.0	Sheeri K. Cabral (Pythian)	PDF	5:31	N/A
Interview
Thoughts on Drizzle and MySQL	Sheeri K. Cabral (Pythian)	N/A	9:22	N/A
Tutorials
MySQL Configuration Options and Files: Basic MySQL Variables (Part 1)	Sheeri K. Cabral (Pythian)	PDF	1:25:04, pre-break 1:35:47, post-break	session 12408
MySQL Configuration Options and Files: Intermediate MySQL Variables (Part 2)	Sheeri K. Cabral (Pythian)	PDF	1:25:04, pre-break 1:24:28, post-break	session 12435
Sessions
Better Database Debugging for Shorter Downtimes	Rob Hamel (Pythian)	PDF	33:13	session 13021
Find Query Problems Proactively With Query Reviews	Sheeri K. Cabral (Pythian)	PDF	45:59	session 13267
Time Zones and MySQL	Sheeri K. Cabral (Pythian)	PDF	45:54	session 12412
Security Around MySQL	Danil Zburivsky (The Pythian Group)	ODP	37:27	session 13458
Continual Replication Sync	Danil Zburivsky (The Pythian Group)	ODP	45:57	session 13428

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I hinted last week of my acceptance with Oracle before the formal announcement this week at the MySQL Users Conference, not for a job but as Oracle ACE Director. In today’s State of the MySQL Community keynote by Kaj Arnö I was one of the first three MySQL nominees that are now part of this program.

What exactly is an ACE Director? Using the description from the Oracle website.

Oracle ACEs and Oracle ACE Directors are known for their strong credentials as Oracle community enthusiasts and advocates, with candidates nominated by anyone in the Oracle Technology and Applications communities. The baseline requirements are the same for both designations; however, Oracle ACE Directors work more closely and formally with Oracle in terms of their community activity.

What does this mean to me?

As a significant contributor to the community I now have the opportunity to continue as well as to contribute to how Oracle continues to interact, promote and involve the MySQL community. As stewards our role as an Oracle ACE Director is to be actively involved. I look forward to the challenge to help shape and improve our State of the MySQL Community.

News and References
Welcome, Oracle ACE Directors for MySQL

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