Lenz Grimmer's blog

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

Tomorrow (Thursday, 11th of September) at 9:00 PST/16:00 UTC/17:00 GMT/18:00 CET, there will be an new free MySQL University Session. MySQL University started as an internal training program for MySQL engineers, to share and spread knowledge about their areas of expertise and has been available to the public for quite some time now. It covers a wide range of technical topics around the MySQL Server and usually takes place once per week.

For the first time, the presentation will not be performed by (former) MySQL employees/developers, but by two of our "Sun Classic" colleagues: Jyri Virkki (OpenSolaris Web Stack community lead) and Murthy Chintalapati (Sr Engineering Manager, Web Stack development) will talk about the OpenSolaris Web Stack:

OpenSolaris Web Stack is an OpenSolaris project and community building an integrated stack of popular open source web tier infrastructure technologies such as Apache HTTP server, MySQL, memcached, PHP and Ruby On Rails optimized for Solaris platform. This session introduces OpenSolaris Web Stack, its status and future development including addition of newer technologies such as lighttpd, Varnish etc., as well as the ease of use features for developers and deployers. We will also be discussing an experimental web stack IPS package repository and it could be leveraged to build and make available popular end user applications such as Drupal.

MySQL University sessions are free to attend - all you need is an IRC client (to post your questions and comments) and an audio player capable of playing back an OGG audio stream, so you can listen to what is being said. See the Instructions for Attendees on the MySQL University pages for more information on how to log in and attend. The audio stream will be recorded and published on the MySQL University pages for later consumption, in case you can't make it or want to listen to a previous session.

One of the sessions at DrupalCon I attended was Larry Garfield's talk about "Drupal Databases: The Next Generation", which gave me a good insight into the current state of the Drupal database layer and how they plan to overhaul it for Drupal 7. The key points that I took away:

• A new API based on PDO
• Object-oriented, requiring PHP5
• Support for using prepared statements
• A unified access API
• A query builder
• More support for other database systems (currently Drupal supports MySQL and PostgreSQL only). In particular, they are keen on adding SQLite support, to ease local development.
• Support for master-slave replication (by randomly distributing reads among the hosts)
• Support for using different database types in parallel (e.g. using SQLite for read-only tables, MySQL for everything else)

The slides and a video of the presentation are available, if you want to check it out. There is a task list on the Drupal.org web site that keeps track of the ongoing activities.

I'm back home from DrupalCon 2008 now - it has been a great event! I met a lot of nice people from the Drupal Community and learned a lot about this CMS. I've been very busy in uploading the remaining pictures from the event to my gallery - so here's for your viewing pleasure:

• Impressions from Szeged
• Day One - 2008-08-27
• Day Two - 2008-08-28
• Day Three - 2008-08-29
• Day Four - 2008-08-30

I also gave two talks and held a BoF there - the slides have now been attached to the session nodes, one of them (the HA session) even includes a video recording:

• bzr - The Bazaar source revision control system
• MySQL Backup and Security - Best practices
• High availability solutions for MySQL: An Overview and practical demo (Video)

I've also uploaded some pictures from FrOSCon to my Gallery now, hope you enjoy them! The slides of my FrOSCon talks are now uploaded to the conference system as well:

• OpenSolaris für Linuxer
• bzr - The Bazaar source revision control system

Hello and greetings from DrupalCon 2008 in Szeged, Hungary!

We (Thierry Manfé, Scott Mattoon and myself) are having a great time manning our booth and talking about Drupal, MySQL and Open Source@Sun with the nice crowd of Drupal Users and Developers here. Sun is a gold sponsor of the event and we're giving a number of sessions as well.

Today I gave my first presentation about MySQL Backup and Security - Best practices - unfortunately I ran a tad bit out of time at the end... The slides have already been attached to the session page, so you can read up on the last few things I was going to talk about. Feel free to contact me, if you have further questions!

Tomorrow I'll be talking about High availability solutions for MySQL: An Overview and practical demo, which will also include a practical demonstration of a two-Node Linux Cluster, performed by Jakub Suchy. In the afternoon, I will also hold a BoF about bzr - The Bazaar source revision control system

I've also uploaded some pictures from the event (and some impressions from the city) on my gallery (more will follow later). Enjoy!

As last year, MySQL will host three Customer Conferences in Europe. They will take place at the following dates and locations:

• Thursday, October 23, 2008: London, UK
• Tuesday, October 21, 2008: Munich, Germany
• Wednesday, November 19, 2008: Paris, France

The content differs slightly per location, but there will be sessions in two parallel tracks on a wide range of topics, including success stories from customers as well as talks on very technical/practical topics. Here are some excerpts from the agenda for the UK Event:

• Delivering Web 2.0 Applications with MySQL and memcached (Ivan Zoratti, Head of MySQL Sales Engineering, EMEA)
• Best Practices for Deploying MySQL on Solaris (MC Brown, Technical Writer)
• High Scalability with Load Balancing & MySQL Proxy (Jan Kneschke, Senior Software Engineer)
• Choosing the Right HA Solution for MySQL (Anders Karlsson, Sales Engineer)
• MySQL Performance Under a Microscope (Tobias Asplund, Senior Instructor)
• Backup Strategies for MySQL (Kai Voigt, Senior Instructor)

If you use MySQL in a production environment, you should seriously consider attending one of these events. The speakers all know their stuff from practical, hands-on experience "in the trenches", no marketing fluff.

And if you register before August 31st, you will receive an early bird discount (e.g. 159 EUR instead of 199 EUR for the German event). Don't miss the opportunity!

I just got informed that two of my session proposals for DrupalCon 2008 got accepted - I will be speaking about the following topics there:

• MySQL Backup and Security - Best practices
• High availability solutions for MySQL: An Overview and practical demo

The second talk will be held in cooperation with Jakub Suchy, who will take over the practical demo. Sun Microsystems is a Gold Sponsor of the event and I am glad that we can show some support for this truly amazing and vibrant community CMS. DrupalCon 2008 will take place from August, 27th-30th in Szeged, Hungary. The list of proposed talks looks truly impressive! Among the key note speakers will be Dries Buytaert and Rasmus Lerdorf. I look very much forward to this conference. If you have a chance, make sure to attend it!

While we're on the topic of Bazaar - this week I got informed by the organizers of the FrOSCon 2008 conference that they accepted two of my talk proposals: one session will be an introduction to this source code management system (what a coincidence), the other one will be an introduction to OpenSolaris for Linux users, explaining some of the underlying technologies and how they differ from what a seasoned Linux user may be accustomed to.

And no, I have not given up on using Linux - quite the contrary! I have been very impressed by the latest OpenSUSE 11.0 release and already run it for since quite some time on several of my work systems. In fact, I already convinced several colleagues of mine to give it a try as well! I am amazed by the speed and "out of the box experience" of this version and I actually plan to install it on my Genesi Pegasos PowerPC machine as well, replacing Debian on there. But as a Sun employee, I of course have to familiarize myself with the other products and projects that we're involved in. And on the Server side, Solaris does have a few interesting features that Linux currently lacks. But I digress.

I look forward to speaking at FrOSCon again - it has been a great conference in the past two years. Very well organized, nice venue, a relaxed atmosphere and excellent technical sessions and speakers.

Other MySQLers submitted talks as well - for example, Giuseppe will give a presentation titled "MySQL Community How To", Susanne will give a PostgreSQL tutorial and others will participate in the separate PHP subconference. Don't miss it - this year's FrOSCon will take place on August 23rd&24th in St. Augustin, Germany (close to Bonn). For the first time, we will also try to set up a MySQL project table. So if you are there, make sure to stop by and have a chat with us!

I've just been informed that a PDF of my slides as well as a recording of yesterday's webinar about MySQL Backup and Security (in German) is already available for replay/review. You can access the files from our on demand webinars page (free registration required). Enjoy!

If you are new to MySQL and would like to get an overview about some best practices for securing a MySQL server and some commonly used backup techniques, consider attending this webinar (in german), held by yours truly. It will take place this Tuesday (2008-06-17) at 15:00 CEST - participation is free of charge! This is my first attempt to perform a webinar, I usually give talks in front of a live audience... Let's see how it goes.

JFYI, I now placed a PDF of my MySQL Conference talk slides about "Performing MySQL backups using Linux LVM Snapshots" on my MySQL talks page. Enjoy!

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!

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!

Back when I still worked at SuSE, I was in charge of maintaining a number or packages of the distribution (actually, you should still be able to find traces of my work in the RPM changelogs). Nowadays, I maintain a number of packages for openSUSE and other distributions on the openSUSE Build Service, which is just brilliant for this purpose.

If you happen to live in northern Germany and are interested to learn more about the RPM package manager and how to build packages, consider coming to the TU Harburg this coming Thursday (March 13th). At 19:00, I will give a presentation about this topic in building, D, room D1023 (in cooperation with the Hamburg branch of the German Unix User Group). More information (in German) can be obtained from here.

See you there!

Since almost a year now, we host a weekly training session for our engineers on Thursday (14:00 UTC winter time), coined the "MySQL University". While it's primary purpose is to share and distribute knowledge about a wide variety of topics relevant to our own developers, many of the sessions are of general interest for developers on other projects as well.

Therefore we hold this sessions in the public and everybody is welcome to attend! You can listen to the presentation via an OGG Audio stream, questions can be posted via IRC on the #mysql-university channel on freenode.net. The audio file and IRC log will be saved, so you can also listen to past university sessions at a later point in time again.

Tomorrow's session will be about using the Valgrind memory checker, held by Stewart Smith, a colleague from Australia who is a member of the MySQL Cluster development team.

The next upcoming sessions include topics more closely related to MySQL Server development:

• February 28: New Optimizer Features in MySQL 6.0 (Sergey Petrunia)
• March 6: How to Add a Collation (Alexander Barkov)
• March 13: Checking Threading and Locking With Helgrind (Stewart Smith)
• March 20: Building MySQL Client Applications (Hartmut Holzgraefe)

See the MySQL University page on the MySQL Forge Wiki for more details and follow the instructions for attendees to get connected.