Hello everyone who is attending MySQLConf 2008!

I am finally able to announce when and where the Pythian BoF session has been scheduled! It will be in the Alameda room, 7:30-8:30pm on Tuesday, April 15th.

The session, titled “Ask the Pythian Maestro”, will be attended by myself and our two MySQL team leads, Sheeri K. Cabral and Augusto Bott.

This should be a fun session and hopefully people will show up. Attendees will get to:

• Schmooze with Augusto, Sheeri, and I, ask us your technical questions and find out if we know what we’re talking about
• Meet active Pythian customers - I have just been informed of the schedule and I am hopeful that several can attend
• Find out what it’s like to work at Pythian if that’s what you’re in to
• Find out what it’s like to have Pythian as collaborators at your workplace
• Have some drinks on me. Depending on the rules, I’ll have some on premises and we’ll head to a local drinking joint afterwards for sure

That sounds like a lot of fun to me. I hope to see you there.

Paul

I am delighted to make the announcement of a major strategic hire.

As of this month, Adam Machanic has been hired to lead Pythian’s global SQL Server practice and will be working out of our office in Central Square in Boston, Massachussets. Adam is in my opinion as close as it comes to a resource in the Microsoft SQL Server space that has the personality, track record and respect that Tom Kyte has in the Oracle space. Speaking as someone who is a huge fan of Tom Kyte’s, believe me that is saying a lot.

He is the co-author of several books on most SQL Server Professionals’ bookshelves, including Inside SQL Server 2005: Query Tuning and Optimization from Microsoft Press, Expert SQL Server 2005 Development from Apress and Pro SQL Server 2005 from Apress. (Hey Adam, that last one only got four stars on Amazon.com whereas the other two are well into five star territory - what’s up with that!?)

He is also a prolific blogger and presenter, a Microsoft SQL Server MVP, a Log Buffer alumnus, and generally a great person to be working with.

Seriously, check out this Microsoft MVP profile for a sense of why I’m so happy and excited to be working with Adam.

Congratulations Adam, and welcome!

For those of you who are curious, Pythian’s SQL Server practice was launched in 2005 and serves almost 20 of our 100 or so customers. We have some ambitious goals in place for Adam to double that practice within a year.

This is the first place I am announcing this: The Pythian Group has made me a Team Lead. I am extremely honored and somewhat humbled by this, and I am determined to do a good job. I started officially on Monday, March 3rd, and my first week went pretty well.

On Saturday, I spent a short bit of time automating one process. And while I was waiting for a 300G backup to copy from one machine to another, I worked on automating more.

Currently I have one somewhat junior DBA working for me, and I am getting another DBA tomorrow. But yesterday, I put in more than a half day of work. Why? Well, I was automating more to make the life of my team members easier.

As part of the DBA service, we offer monitoring in the form of alerting, and also in the form of daily checks to ensure everything is running smoothly. Daily checks consist of things that do not need to be checked every minute, but should be checked frequently. For instance, one of our daily checks is to ensure that the running database configuration matches the config file (i.e., my.cnf or my.ini). This is very valuable to ensure that no changes get lost. A DBA might be adjusting the configuration, but forget to put the final changes in the config file. In that case, the next day our daily checks will throw a warning, and that DBA will say “oh yeah, I forgot to put that into the config file!”

As many monitoring systems do, our system has false negatives. Though we do not normally “do the dailies” on weekends, I spent some time Saturday with them. I took the checks that were false negatives and fixed them to not show errors or warnings for those false negatives. For instance, many of our machines complained that the have-bdb parameter was set to DISABLED in the database but set to YES in the default file — because we used skip-bdb in the /etc/my.cnf. We did not set something like have-bdb=0, so the check complained. I fixed that problem, and a few others.

The result is that I went from 26% of my team’s machines reporting “daily checks are OK, nothing to look at” to 46% of my team’s machines reporting that. This means that my team can be more productive and spend time on the real errors, instead of clicking and taking the time to realize “oh, yeah, that, it’s just a false negative.”

Well, in the “notes from the front line” part of this post….

I have been a MySQL DBA at The Pythian Group for three months (and 2 days) now. At most companies that is the probationary period, and I am still here, so that is a good sign…..

So, after three months, how do I like it? Glad you asked!

Pros:

1. I am basically a consultant for about 10 different clients — there is always DBA work to do (I do not have to fill in sysadmin stuff like at previous jobs)


2. I am paid a salary and do not need to worry about finding new clients, nor health insurance, etc.


3. Teams are small, so you get to interact with a few coworkers regularly and often (there are about 60 DBAs, which would be unwieldy if we all worked without a team structure).


4. I have already gotten to work with at least 2 technologies (including Cluster) that I have wanted to work with, but had not had the opportunity to in previous workplaces. I have learned a lot and continue to learn.


5. People care about each other, and that starts at the top. Paul Vallee, President, has a philosophy that in any negotiation, both parties should be happy. He cares about the company doing a good job and having happy employees. Having his company do well means a positive cash flow for the most part, but that is not to the exclusion of all other things.


6. Pythian encourages independence, and trusts DBAs to plan and do their work, with the help of the team leads. I have not had a “boss” tell me what to do, but I have had reminders from my team lead of my priorities.

(more…)

Courtesy of our friends at Oracle cost containment company Miro Consulting, I am giving a webinar tomorrow at 1pm EST (click this link for the time in other timezones please.

The subject I’ve chosen is how to apply the best practices around advanced supply management that are extremely successful and mature in the product supply chain world to the equally extremely immature practices we typically find in enterprise IT supply provisioning.

It should be a great presentation; I give an overview of the famous “Toyota Way” and cover some recent findings from the California Management Review as well.

The first point of the webinar is gaining an understanding of what the “supply management promise” really is - in broad terms it means achieving double-digit annual compound cost savings on the resource being supplied. The second point of the webinar is to discuss the methods for achieving this recurring savings and how to apply them to IT services.

This isn’t easy and requires substantial discipline, leadership and often even attitudinal change and leadership from the purchaser, and of course a vendor that is committed to passing on those savings to their customer, something that is culturally de rigueur in the product/manufacturing space, but highly unusually in the IT infrastructure management space (since claiming those savings are typically the vendor’s profit model). Of course, the Pythian approach is highly compatible with the application of advanced supply management strategies, whereas most outsourcing companies in the IT infrastructure and architecture space are very much not. Interestingly enough, the fully-insourced approach to enterprise data and systems management is also incapable of delivering the savings (because of the substantial cost in morale and team cohesion of claiming any should they materialize).

The target audience for this presentation is executives responsible for the IT infrastructure spend, often CFOs, COOs and CTOs who have an oversight role not only for the database licensing cost, but also for the operational cost of IT infrastructure ownership. A technical audience will learn about how Pythian works and how we position our offering to the executive suite purchaser.

I’ll do my best to get the audio and slides up on our website in the coming days.

As I mentioned, the presentation is being hosted and sponsored by Miro, a great partner of Pythian’s, and I blogged about Miro once before, here. You can register for the presentation by following this link: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/204538076. Although the presentation is sponsored by Miro and they focus on Oracle, the presentation is not at all Oracle-specific and the techniques I discuss within it are highly appropriate for customers of Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server or MySQL.

After landing (link), and a 5 day fiesta of arranging my long term apartment here, Pythian Dubai is now fully operational with me been the first employee here.

Here is a picture of the Pythian Dubai office:

And the view from the window:

Next step, hire more people! We have 4 desks to fill. I feel a bit lonely here.

Greetings from Dubai!

It is indeed a different world here. I have a feeling I’ll like it even more over the next three months I am here on Pythian duties. I will be writing more, so stay tuned.

The photos above and below are, respectively, of Dubai Internet City, and Dubai Marina.

The latest release of DBD::Oracle is now ready and can be found at: CPAN DBD::Oracle. It is a Perl module that works with the DBI module to provide access to Oracle databases. It is maintained by me, John Scoles as open source/free software, under the auspices of The Pythian Group.

The release has been fully tested with the latest version of DBI (1.601).

Below is the list of the changes and/or fixes in this release. (more…)

I was blog-tagged by Doug Burns - his post is here: I *hate* chain letters ….

I hate them too, I literally never pass them on no matter what vile fate that condemns me to (so far nothing has happened so maybe those are idle threats). But this one includes a chance to talk about myself without seeming too self-involved, and there wasn’t even a threat of eternal damnation if I don’t do it. So let’s proceed then!

8 things about me that aren’t common knowledge:

1. I was born in Windsor, Ontario, Canada, which is just south of Detroit, Michigan. I celebrated my thirteenth birthday in Montpellier, France, where my entire family relocated for a year. I moved to Ottawa for school when I was 17, and lived in Minneapolis Minnesota for a year in 1996-97 where I worked for a great company called Pragmatek. I am a French-Canadian, but my English is unaccented. Unless you count my outrageous Canadian accent, eh?
2. I was 17 years old when I started my university education. This has everything to do with how much I hated high school, and nothing to do with me being “smart”. Even though I hated high school, I was voted most likely to succeed at my graduation ceremony to my incredible shock and embarassment. Since that award is by any definition a popularity contest, I am still and always will be puzzled as to how that happened.
3. I’ve always loved UNIX or UNIX-like operating systems, and UNIX servers. No, seriously, from a young age. When I moved to Ottawa for University, my father co-signed a loan for me (around $3500) to buy a used Sun workstation for my dorm room (this was an upgrade from a CP/M box, guess which!). Everybody else had PCs. I traded in that Sun for a NeXT a few years later.
4. My heroes are Carl Sagan who more than anyone else inspired in me a sense of wonder and awe for the universe we live in, and ingrained in me a deep love for science and the scientific method; and Steve Jobs, who more than anyone else inspired in me a sense of appreciation for excellence, appreciation for genius, and the importance of generating passion and excitement in your work (that excitement and passion must always start with yourself.) That’s a favourite Steve Jobs article linked there, which was especially influential to me.
5. I am a sucker for a good analogy. I think with them, I love them, and I use them all the time when trying to explain or convince. My staff and customers tease me about that continuously.
6. My first real Oracle exposure was in a project on Oracle 5. Not because that was current, it was incredibly obsolete already (I’m talking about 1993 here!). But it was what we had. That and a current version of SAS. We wrote most of our stuff to SAS. I started working with Oracle in earnest in 1996, doing a huge Oracle 6 to Oracle 7 migration on VMS.
7. I was 25 years old in 1997, when I co-founded Pythian. At the time, we had to bundle Internet services and VPN hardware (and even leased-lines) with our services since our customers typically didn’t already have Internet. My how times have changed.
8. We post family pictures here. That beautiful family is composed of my partner of 12 years Nicole, my 3 year-old son Felix and my 16 month old daughter Clementine. I’m going to wrap this post up and go home to them now.

So… now who to tag? I think I’m going to spread this out somewhat from the Oracle-only blogosphere. I’m not sure about tagging 8 people - can that really be how it works? Here goes…

1. Christo Kutrovsky
2. Yasin Baskan
3. Radoslav Rusinov
4. Sheeri Kritzer
5. George Trujillo
6. Craig Mullins
7. Adam Machanic
8. Ronald Bradford

Hello everyone,

We have several MySQL DBA openings, one in each of our offices in Ottawa, Boston, or Hyderabad, India. (Our Sydney office is doin’ fine.)

Working at Pythian is different than working in-house or as a consultant, because you’ll be making your contributions available to each of the customers assigned to your team, allowing you to see more use cases, more technologies, and work with more and varied environments, all the while building interesting and long-lasting working relationships with your peers. I will gladly sponsor a work visa for the right candidate anywhere in the world.

We support some of the most interesting internet-scale MySQL environments in the world, including major environments for Fox Interactive Media, Videoegg.com, Electronic Arts, and Renkoo.com.

Top Criteria

• Outstanding MySQL production administration and server tuning skills, bonus points for cluster, partitioning, and major implementation and upgrades experience
• Exceptional troubleshooting, problem-solving and learning skills
• Superior productivity per hour and overall getting-the-job-done-right abilities
• Fluent communication skills in English, both written and oral, are mandatory. Second or third languages are also a plus (we have customers all over the world and are always eager to add a language to our repertoire)
• Stored procedure, trigger, view and nonstandard storage engine experience a plus (such as SoliddDB, the Amazon S3 engine, Falcon, etc.)
• Interest or experience in publications, blogging, and presentations a plus

Job Highlights

• Work on an elite team of DBAs for an elite and growing group of customers; you’ll learn more here in a year than in any in-house DBA job no matter how long you stay; I personally guarantee it.
• Work and gain valuable experience on every mainstream platform, including AIX, HP/UX, Solaris, Linux, Tru64, Windows, etc. We many not run MySQL on all of those platforms, but we certainly run enterprise infrastructure on one team or another on each of those and more. If you’re interested in technology, there a lot of it in use here and that makes it a great place to be.
• Learn and support every mainstream technology and feature, including cluster, advanced replication, GIS, etc. etc.
• Work across multiple industries including health care, manufacturing, media, dot-com, education, retail, services, and many more.
• Work in a company that values hard work, not long work.
• Work in a company that allows you to research and write articles, presentations and blog posts on company time, and pays for you to present your research at just about any user conference worldwide.
• There is also the obvious opportunity to learn Oracle and SQL Server, if you don’t already know those platforms. We here at Pythian are about the data, first and foremost. So keep your platform advocacy for the conferences, mmmkay? We love ‘em all ’round these parts.
• Consult for high-profile customers all around the world without leaving the office. This is really the most awesome part; almost any other job on the planet that remotely lets you see this much tech has you traveling like mad. Not us.

To Apply

Send us an email with a one-paragraph introduction of who you are and why you are exceptional at hr@pythian.com. Feel free to attach your résumé in any format — text, Word, PDF, RTF, ODT, whatever makes you happy.