Colin Charles Agenda

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.

If you’ve been busy and haven’t registered yet, remember that early-bird pricing ends on 31/03/2011. From April 1-10, you’ll have to pay USD$100 more. A discount code for use (I think you save 20-25%): mys11fsd.

We’re full up in terms of the schedule. People are still asking for an opportunity to speak, and there are still opportunities in the Products & Services track. Please contact Yvonne Romaine at yromaine@oreilly.com for more information on this.

Might I also suggest that if you want to speak and there’s no longer an opportunity, you submit a five-minute talk for the Ignite MySQL event. Even though submissions are now closed, contact Brian Aker — he’ll try and help make some magic happen for you.

Don’t forget you can also lead a Birds of a Feather (BoF) session. While it is not a talk, you can still gather like-minded folk and talk about things over pizza & beer (which has always been a popular combination in previous years).

If you’re looking for a new job, don’t forget the Career Zone. There are some great companies participating, so that’s another good reason to come.

Conferences are all about networking. While not enabled by default, I suggest you manually go and turn on access to the Attendee Directory, so you can write messages to people you want to meet, have chats with, and so on.

A quick update on a few keynotes that the O’Reilly MySQL Conference & Expo 2011 managed to recently close:

• The opening keynote, The State of the Dolphin, given by none other than Tomas Ulin, who is currently the VP of the MySQL Engineering team at Oracle. I am told that this is not just a “what’s new” and “what’s coming up”, as there will also be a Q&A session with an analyst, customer, and Tomas. You must not miss this on Tuesday morning at 9am, 12th April 2011.
• On Thursday at 9.30am, we have The Next Decade in Data Management, a keynote given by Mike Olson, CEO of Cloudera. More and more I see people using Hadoop/Hbase alongside their MySQL installs, so I think this talk is a must-see.

Early bird registration ends March 15 2011. What are you waiting for? Procrastination will cost you!

Don’t forget to follow the conference via social media: Facebook, Twitter.

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:

It is my pleasure to be your Program Chair, for the O’Reilly MySQL Conference & Expo 2010, to be held April 12-15 2010, in Santa Clara, California.

It is of course, not something I embark on alone. I have a program committee, comprising of some amazing folk: Brian Aker, Kaj Arno, Roland Bouman, Sheeri K. Cabral, Robin Schumacher, Baron Schwartz, and Jeff Wiss.

I can highly encourage you to submit a proposal. You have till January 27, 2010, which basically means, less than a month, so get cracking! I also can highly recommend you to register as an attendee.

I’ll talk more about the processes, et al, in a later blog post, but I want to ensure that in 2010, we are going to be completely open and transparent in our decision making process. And I want you, the MySQL community, to participate. Watch this space for more details.

And again, its a great honour, being your Program Chair for the conference in 2010. I expect it to be a blast.

I caught up with Marc Delisle (we have a relatively old interview with him on the MySQL DevZone) recently, and got him to give us an introduction to phpMyAdmin, the several books he’s written, and how the project gets new features from the Google Summer of Code. What’s really impressive? They continue winning awards (Marc won one from MySQL in 2009 as well!), and have a user base of nearly 18.5 million (this is downloads — not just users, considering how common it is in shared hosting environments). Watch the video for more.