Percona Live Data Performance Conference 2016 - CFP and Community voting

The call for participation for Percona Live Data Performance Conference 2016 is still open. Deadline for submission is November 29th.

There are two immediately noticeable novelties in this edition:

• The name change. Not "MySQL & Expo" but "Data Performance Conference." It makes the conference open to a broader set of topics.
• The community voting. Proposals can get evaluated by the community before the review committee takes decisions.

I think it's a good choice. Other conferences adopt the same method. The attendees choose what they want to see and hear. In this case, it's mixed method, where the community voting is used as an indication for the review committee, which, by my understanding, has the final say.

Vote for my proposals!

Below are my proposals. Clicking on the links below will take you to the conference site, where you can say if you want to see these talks or not. You will need to register (to the site, not yet to the conference) in order to cast votes.

• MySQL Replication, the community sceptic roundup

Here is a talk that is in continuous evolution. It discusses the latest advances in replication, and gives an honest evaluation of the features from a new user standpoint. This talk, if accepted, will be updated with the latest novelties in MariaDB and MySQL, if they come out in time for the conference. You can see in my blog six articles covering related matters.

• MySQL operations in Docker

Another tutorial, this one aimed at users of containers who want to get started with this exciting technology. Also for this topic I have written a few articles.

• MySQL deployment methods - whole servers, sandboxes, virtual machines, containers

This is a short talk that wants to explain the differences between deployment methods. Standalone physical servers, sandboxes, virtual machines, and containers are choices that require some information to get started. This talk, for which I also wrote an article, wants to show the good and bad of each choice.

• The geeky pleasure of wet shaving

This is a lightning talk, which is not about data performance, but it's a geeky topic and I was asked to submit it. So here it is!

Sessions at Percona Live MySQL Conference 2013: fun, competition, novelties, and a free pass

The Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo 2013 is almost 1 month away. It's time to start planning, set the expectations, and decide what to attend. This post will give a roundup of some of the sessions that I recommend attending and I look forward to.

First, the unexpected!

After much talk and disbelief, here they come! Oracle engineers will participate to the Percona Live conference. This is wonderful! Their participation was requested by the organizers, by the attendees, and by community advocates, who all told the Oracle management how important it is to be in this conference. Finally, they have agreed to come along, and here they are, with one keynote and three general sessions.

• [Tue 10:50am] The State of the Dolphin
• [Wed 2:50pm] MySQL 5.6: Performance Benchmarks, Tuning, and ‘Best’ Practices
• [Wed 11:50am] MySQL 5.6: Redefining Replication
• [Tue 4:50pm] MySQL 5.6: What’s New in InnoDB

My talks

I will be a speaker at the conference, and thus it's no surprise that I will recommend my talks.

• [Mon 1:30pm] Using Tungsten Replicator to solve replication problems. This is a complete walkout to explain Tungsten replicator, from the basics to multiple masters deployment and advanced techniques.
• [Wed 3:30pm] Script it! Make professional DBA tools out of nothing. This is a session that shows how to create admin scripts that deploy MySQL servers and put them in replication.
• [Wed 3:30pm] There is an old tradition about Lightning talks, which will happen during the community reception. I am the host of the lightning talks, but among them, there is also one of mine: MySQL Replication mythology

My company's talks

Continuent is very active at many conferences, and at this one we are participating massively. I know I look partial in this matter, but I am really proud of the products that we create and maintain at my company. That's why I highly recommend these talks.

• [Wed 9:00am] Keynote – How MySQL Can Thrive in the World of Massive Data Hype. This is no marketing. Robert Hodges explains why and how you can make business with good intentions.
• [Tue 11:30am] Getting started with Tungsten Replicator. This is alternative replication with lots of advanced features. If plain replication is unsatisfactory, that's one place to look.
• [Wed 1:00pm] State of the Art for MySQL Multi-Master Replication. Yet another talk by Robert. This one is a semi-philosophical talk, explaining what you can and can't do with multiple master technologies.
• [Wed 2:00pm] Surviving an Amazon Outage Neil Armitage explains the theory (a little) and practice (a lot) of high availability.
• [Thu 11:50am] Replicating in Real-Time Between Oracle and Oracle, and Oracle and MySQL with Tungsten. Replicating from and to Oracle used to be extremely expensive. Tungsten Replicator makes it cheap, even free!

Competing with whom?

MySQL is a standard, and widely popular. Yet, it has shortcomings and weak points, which allow for alternative solutions to flourish. There are many sessions that offer alternatives to the vanilla software.

• [Tue 1:20pm] MariaDB Cassandra Interoperability. MariaDB is a magnetic fork of MySQL. It's magnetic in the sense that it attract most of the features or enhancements that nobody else wanted to accept. While some of its features may look like a whim (and some of them have been discontinued already), there are some that look more interesting than others. This integration with Cassandra deserves some exploration.
• [Tue 3:50pm] MySQL Cluster - When to use it and when not to. The classic MySQL Cluster. Some believe that it's a drop-in replacement for a single server. It's not. It's a powerful solution, but it is not fit for all.
• [Wed 11:10am] Fine Tuning Percona XtraBackup to your workload. This tool has become a de-facto standard. It is available everywhere, easy to use, and powerful. A great tale of an alternative tool that became the standard.
• [Thu 9:00am] MySQL, YourSQL, NoSQL, NewSQL - the state of the MySQL ecosystem While all the keynotes are worth attending, this one is special. If you want to understand the MySQL world, Matt Aslett can draw a quite useful map for you.

New and renewed technologies

There are many interesting talks about new things, or old technologies with a new twist.

• [Tue 3:50pm] common_schema: DBA's framework for MySQL. This is the most promising collection of SQL tools that you can find. Must see.
• [Tue 4:50pm] Multi-Tier Asynchronous Replication Using Symmetricds. I don't really know what this is about, but it makes me curious.
• [Wed 1:00pm] Optimized Integration between MySQL and Hadoop by Gwen Shapira. Gwen is an expert of big data, and an excellent speaker.

Tales from the trenches

• [Wed 4:30pm] Lessons learned managing 500+ MySQL servers in the cloud
• [Thu 1:50pm] Scaling Pinterest - The Next Stage

Win a free pass

Percona is offering free passes for community participation. One of them is available to readers of this blog and I will be the judge.

To get a free pass, do the following:

1. Blog, tweet, or post on another public media about this conference;
2. Leave a comment here, with a link to your post;
3. The free pass will be given to the most useful or pleasant post;
4. Make sure there is a way to reach you by email or twitter;

Please notice:

• I will award the free pass to the post that I like most. The adjudication will be entirely subjective.
• Deadline: March 20th, 2013.

Solving replication problems with Tungsten replicator

On Monday afternoon, Neal Armitage and I will be speaking at Percona Live in London. It will be a three hours tutorial about Tungsten replicator.

The contents of this tutorial are mostly new. We have released recently a new and easier way of installing different topologies, in the shape of cookbook scripts, which are distributed with the replicator tarball.

Using this cookbook, any user can simply install multiple topologies, from the simple master/slave to all-masters, fan-in, and star.

There are recipes for showing the replication cluster, switching roles between master and a chosen slave, taking over MySQL replication, installing direct slaves with parallel replication, testing each topology, and uninstalling all.

All the above will be demonstrated during the tutorial, with the addition of conflict prevention and more management issues.

The Tungsten cookbook in the wiki has been updated to reflect the changes.

OpenSQLCamp EU 2010 - Call for participation

The European OpenSQLCamp 2010 will take place in parallel to the Free and Open Source Conference 2010 (FrOSCon) on Saturday 21st and Sunday 22nd August at the Fachhochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg in St. Augustin, Germany. St. Augustin is located close to Bonn and Cologne. The Call for Participation is now online.

The event is organized by yours truly and Felix Schupp, and we are open to cooperation from other volunteers.
Specifically, we need help to beat the drum. Even if you can't participate, we will appreciate your help in making the Call for Participation known.
OpenSQLCamp2010 will use the FrOSCon's Pentabarf conference coordination system to collect talk submissions and perform the organizing and scheduling of the talks.
Please create an account there, if you don't have one already. Once you have activated your account via the email address you provided, please log into the system and create a new event. Make sure to select track OpenSQLCamp for your submission!

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IMPORTANT! - FrOSCon uses CA certificates. If you browser does not recognize them, then you need to Import the CAcert Root Certificate before using the CfP pages.

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The deadline for submitting your proposal is Sunday, July 11th, 2010 (12:00pm PST).