Yesterday I presented “Best Practices for Database Administrators” at the MySQL User Conference and Expo. I was successful in streaming the live video on www.ustream.tv, and you can see it in totality at http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/352479.

The slides are available in pdf form. And here are some of the links I spoke about:

cacti
nagios
rt

MySQL 5.0 manual
explain
show variables
show status
data types
procedure analyse()
mysqldumpslow’s manual page says “Use mysqldumpslow –help to see the options that this command supports.”

mysqlsla
mysqlreport
Maatkit, contains mk-query-profiler and mk-table-sync

mytop
innotop

Jonathan Schwartz’s Keynote at the 2008 MySQL Conference can be played directly in your browser or you can download the 147MB .wmv file. (Please do not download the movie on the conference wireless system!)

I finally realized who Jonathan Schwartz reminds me of:

That’s right, comedian and magician Penn Jillette.

Schwartz started by saying, “enough of this free software stuff!” It got lots of laughs. He started to talk about Sun’s agenda, and mentioned that MySQL and Sun had similar values, as well as similar dysfunctions as well — particularly that each engineer has his/her own opinion.

But Schwartz goes on in earnest to say “The future will be defined by free….and freedom,” that “freedom is a price tag *and* a philosophy.” I agree completely.

He sees “the network is a social utility” much like heat and electricity are utilities. His talk somewhat reminded me of the Free as in Water post I made in June 2007.

He finished up by comparing the Amazon River to Sun — The Amazon River is really ecosystem of many rivers — 10,000 smaller rivers. Sun is really an ecosystem of many communities — Java, Open Office, Solaris, Open Solaris, MySQL, and so on. I was very pleased to hear that he feels that community is not only inclusive of all users, paid or otherwise, but that the ecosystem cannot exist without each part of that “smaller river” contributing to the whole. And *that* is Sun’s agenda, to continue to build that river, so if one part has problems, the entire river is not damaged.

Also, Sun has a quote that “innovation happens elsewhere,” so it is crucial to build those bridges (mixed metaphor unintended) so that Sun can support and enable the innovation. In a world where diversity is key, this is an excellent message.

Bravo, Jonathan!

If you can’t attend the MySQL Conference, you can still virtually attend

Simply visit
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/oursql-the-mysql-database-videocast

2-3 pm PDT on Tuesday, April 15th for the “Best Practices for Database Administrators” session,

and

11:55 am -12:40 pm PDT on Thursday, April 17th for the “Database Security Using White-Hat Google Hacking” session.

You need nothing but your web browser; unlike some other live meetings, audio streams from the website too, so there’s no phone number to call or participant code or anything. There’s also a live chat so you can participate and ask questions while the session is going on.

See you soon, virtually!

At this year’s MySQL Conference & Expo, taking place in Santa Clara, California in mid-April, I’m giving two sessions:

• Best Practices for Database Administrators
• Database Security Using White-Hat Google Hacking

You can see more info about me here, including descriptions of the workshops.

I look forward to seeing many of you there. Make sure you say hello!

Today is Hotsos Symposium 2008 Training Day — one full day with Tom Kyte. I haven’t registered for it so I took the chance to sleep until 10 this morning which was excellent idea considering that last night we were quite late going to bed thanks in parts to the joined demo that James Morle and Mike Erwin organized at the last presentation yesterday. I was in the James’ session and he was demonstrating how to hide latency problem with batching. I suspect that Mike, in the next hall, was showing the impact of MTU settings on cluster interconnect. The end result is that beer bottles travelled between the presentation halls and James ended up with about 3 packs of Guinness and Shiner Bock. That what kept us up longer last night.

James’ presentation itself was excellent — he explained that all performance problems can be caused by either skew or latency. You can’t normally fix skew issue so you just need to be aware and account for it. Latency can sometimes be shortened but usually insignificantly or it’s impractical (i. e. very expensive). It’s also very important to distinguish bandwidth and latency. I like his idea that the efficient way to solve latency is hiding it and there are generally two ways to do that — batching and threading. Improving bandwidth often doesn’t cause any performance improvement without taking latency into account. Very insightful talk. Thanks James.
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The symposia is still ongoing and my head is slowly filling up — relieved from my presentation, finally, I’m able to focus on others’ sessions.

Yesterday, Tanel Poder presented his new tool Sesspack and his integration with Excel. 3 years ago, I created a similar tool and collected session waits and statistics transformed into differences per the interval and organized in the star schema to simplify the analysis. I tried to write a front-end in PHP — it was taking ages and I didn’t have time. Then I tried APEX (HTMLDB 1.6 back then) and it wasn’t flexible enough. I ended up querying the data directly and copy & paste to Excel where I could use pivot charting. What a great feature of Excel — it let me organize the data easily and visualize the problems to management, system and storage administrator and other DBA’s. I moved on and didn’t have time to continue this project, clean it up and put into public domain. I’ve still had it in my mind but there is no need now since Tanel already did far better job. He put the first version of the Sesspack on his web-site about half a year ago. What excited me more this time was the integration with Excel that he did — what a powerful but simple tool in the hands of a smart DBA. I’m looking forward to use it when it becomes available on his web-site.
Update: Tanel put the material on his web-site here.
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First of all “the before” time is over — I’m done with my presentation. It’s been the first slot of the day — 8:30 and Cary Milsap was presenting in another hall so what chances do I have to get people in? It turned out that some people actually did show up and quite a few considering the circumstances.

I have mixed feeling on the results. The presentation started very well and I managed to wake people up at the very beginning — thanks to the “equipment” I had at hands (thanks Marco and Riyaj!). You can spot one of them on the photo (thanks for the photo Marco):

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Like Alex G., I’ve left Ottawa and its wonderful snowy landscape this morning for, let’s say, a sunnier place.

But that’s all we have in common! I know the guy told you he is feeling some stress about his presentation but honestly, I doubt it! He has been preparing it for so long, he knows the subject so well, and he is so smart — just like so many people at Pythian, which is why I like it here so much. And to tell you the truth, I wouldn’t like to be at the Hotsos Symposium this year and have to choose between Alex and Cary Millsap.

So Alex, while you’ll be off socializing (and probably drinking more beers than you should), I will be working very hard, as always, this time with a couple of Oracle product managers.

The good news is everything went perfectly in Ottawa, Chicago, and here in San Francisco. I did not lose anything, and everything has just been on-time. The not-so-good — my hotel in Belmont seems about 800 miles away from Oracle Headquarters in Redwood City. I snapped this photo as I flew by on the highway:

When I arrived there, I had a couple of emails in my inbox; I should be able to meet the people I want to (except for Chuck and Larry, who are obviously too busy).

What I’ll be doing in the next five days is kind of a secret. Unfortunately, that’s all I’m allowed to tell you, except maybe that I know many people who would love to be in my shoes this week.

Last year’s Hotsos Symposium was the first for me. These were exciting few days and I fully enjoyed the conference. I’m very pleased that this year I’m going to Dallas again but this time in the new role — I’m doing a presentation there.

I don’t need to tell you what Hotsos Symposium is about — if you are on this blog, you should know it already. 3 days of high quality presentations and endless networking opportunities where you can share your ideas or concerns and get your questions answered.

My presentation is the first one on Tuesday — 8:30! It’s my first time presenting at Hotsos and I feel somewhat more tense than usual (as if I take it easy every time). I’m not the only new presenter at Hotsos and I know that Robyn Sands is doing her first Hotsos presentation as well (come on Robyn, when can I put that link on your name? ;). Anyway, I guess my sessions would not be attended by a huge crowd — it’s early and Cary Milsap is speaking in the next hall so people must be really interested in my topic to come to mine.

The topic of my presentation is Workload Management in Oracle RAC. I’m quite happy with the end result but I might have a little bit too much material to cover in 1 hour. I expect to spend most of the time in the “demo mode” on my 10g and 11g RAC clusters running on virtual machines on my MacBook. Depending on how it goes, some demos could span a bit longer than I plan depending on position of the moon and stars on Tuesday. I have a contingency plan as I really have to get to the last demo — it’s the coolest part of the session, I think.

I’m still rehearsing the demo and polishing the white paper. Excluding demo placeholders and navigational slides, I have just a little over 20 slides so not much efforts there. Most of the stuff I demonstrate “live” but a lot of details are in the white paper + demo examples provided to follow.

In addition, to the presentation, I will take part in the “Hotsos Campground” sessions on Monday and Tuesday evenings. There will be four of them and each is focused on a particular topic. I’m going to participate in the Hotsos RAC Campground. No surprise. Eh?

My plane leaves at 9:30 tomorrow. I hope there won’t be much snow and I leave on time — today is the first day of the spring on the calendar but I still did my 2 hours shoveling exercise. I think I’m getting better on it and it takes me half of the time I used to spend 3 months ago. Interesting, how much more can I improve?

Anyway, I hope I won’t need to do it again this year. Olga and Alex Jr. are joining me in Dallas after Hotsos and we are going to spend almost 10 days traveling around and, hopefully, enjoying some bits of sun. Bye, bye snow!

The time is flying here and two days of RMOUG Training Days 2008 have gone. In a nutshell, what a great conference! Well done RMOUG and special thanks to Peggy King!

It was very nice to see a bunch of old friend and meet new ones in person including Jeremiah Wilton and Tim Gorman.

I liked the lunch organization — everyone was seated and nice food served — way better than standing buffet. The area with the tables was also used for the breakfast and this is where the keynote was done — excellent idea to combine those together:

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