I’m pleased to announce that there will be the formal launch of Pythian Europe at the premises of the Canadian Embassy in Prague on Wednesday the 6th of August from 17:00 to 18:30. This historic event will be announced by Mrs. Sameena Qureshi, Trade Counsellor, Embassy of Canada; and Paul Vallée, President and Founder, The Pythian Group. Present will be various members from the press (IT and Business), as well as representatives from Oracle and Sun Microsystems, the Canadian Chamber of Commerce in Prague, and many more. We will prepare some unusual and very tasty snacks and refreshments.

We would love for readers of this blog to join us, so please consider this your special, personal invitation from me. Please come if you’re in Prague on Wednesday. If you plan to attend, please contact Dan at elbl@pythian.com.

I am traveling to Europe next week to brief major prospects in Germany (Daimler, MAN) as well as to attend to administrative matters at Pythian Europe in Prague and would love to meet any readers of this blog during this trip!

I’m especially interested in meeting:

• DBAs, Applications Administrators and Systems Administrators,
• Potential customers (IT Directors, DBA Managers, Supply Managers for IT), and
• Potential partners (IT product of service companies that could partner with Pythian to delight our mutual customers)

Here is my itinerary:

• Sunday, August: Frankfurt,
• Monday, August 4: Stuttgart,
• Tuesday, August 5: Munich, and
• Wednesday, August 6 through Saturday, August 9: Prague, Czech Republic.

Please reach out to me using vallee@pythian.com if you would like to meet!

It is with great pride that I am able to announce that Pythian is making a large investment in Europe. As of this month, Pythian Europe s.r.o. is fully operational and we have headquartered the company in beautiful Prague. Additional offices are planned in Paris and Malta by the end of the summer.

Pythian Europe is launching with an elite, full-fledged team and I would like to introduce the founders:

On the left is Lukas Vysusil, who joins us from Oracle where he served for 6 years in a variety of roles, including Oracle Applications DBA, DBA Team Lead, Manager of the Configuration Queue for Oracle OnDemand outsourcing services, and also Senior Technology Consultant. He brings a wealth of experience in team leadership, troubleshooting, Oracle Apps, the pressure cooker of consulting in the enterprise database and applications technology space and formal configuration and change management processes to Pythian and will serve as Service Delivery Manager.

On the right is Jan Polnicky, who joins us from Oracle where he served for 6 years in a wide variety of roles. You’ll have to check his linkedin profile for the entire list, but suffice it to say he started out as a developer for Online Services, quickly took on a leadership role in that team, moved to OnDemand where he became a services team lead, then got promoted to EMEA queue manager for configurations, and then got promoted to OnDemand Services EMEA Manager - Release Management where he led a team of up to 15 engineers across geographies (UK, ES, CZ, EG + USA & APAC indirects) doing general Oracle Database & Apps management, tons of preventative maintenance and supervised a number of Oracle Applications upgrade projects. In his spare time, Jan is working on his Ph.D., I kid you not. Jan will serve as a peer to Lukas as Service Delivery Manager.

You may think that’s enough.

You may be thinking, OK, with these guys and the teams they will soon be leading now Pythian has added so much expertise and horsepower in Europe they’ll stand pat for a while.

But oh no. Not me. That was not enough!

To lead these guys, on the centre, we have also added Peter Simecka as Vice President, Pythian Europe. Peter joins us from, you might have guessed it, Oracle Corporation where he started out in 1994. Even before joining Oracle, he had substantial expertise on Oracle/UNIX, dating back to Oracle 4 (I first worked on Oracle 5, but 6 was already out by then). Over his career at Oracle, Peter has led teams as large as 60 engineers, served as Product Support Manager for five years, served as Customer Support Manager for four years, and then built and led the Oracle OnDemand Outsourcing centre in Prague for four years. To say that he brings a wealth of leadership experience, customer support and liaison experience, and outsourced services design, development and delivery experience is a woeful understatement. I am hoping and planning to learn a lot from him.

It’s funny because the way I presented these guys, it makes it seem like I selected each of them individually, but that’s not how it happened at all. I’ll leave that story for another day, or maybe Peter will want to tell it.

So, what are we planning to do with this ambitious operation in Europe? Stay tuned.

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.

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.

Hello!

I am happy to present the very first post to my new group blog, where I will be inviting Pythian DBAs with interesting thoughts to contribute to prepare blogs of their own. You can read the group blog either one author at a time, by clicking the author’s name in the right-hand side of this column, or if you prefer, you can see all the posts on one page by going to the main group blog page.

My subject for this first posting: DBD::Oracle. If you have used perl to interact with a database, you are aware of the DBI that Tim Bunce and his collaborators first developed in the 1990s in order to interact with a database abstraction layer. DBD::Oracle is one of the database layer drivers that allows the DBI to communicate with Oracle. Pythian is a big user of perl and DBD::Oracle internally, as our problem tracking groupware, Support Track, and our availability monitoring software, avail, are all written using the DBI to communicate with the underlying database.

Late last year, Tim posted to the DBI users’ mailing list looking for a volunteer that would become the maintainer for DBD::Oracle. He explained that as he was no longer a user of Oracle, the task of keeping the software current was becoming increasingly difficult and distracting for him. Pythian volunteered and I am proud to announce that we made our first release, DBD::Oracle 1.17 last month. This release adds support for Oracle XE, Oracle’s free low-end database, and for installation using the Oracle Instant Client, as well as troubleshooting a variety of installation gotchas and bugs in the makefile.

Seah Hull at the Oracle Open Source blog interviewed me on the subject of Pythian taking on the stewardship of DBD::Oracle and even has a podcast of the interview available on his site.

We cover the following material:

1. Why don’t you tell us a bit about yourself, and your company?
2. When a perl programmer wants to interface with a database, what
technology do they use?
3. How did that DBI project get started, and by whom?
4. How does the DBD::Oracle component come into play? What language is it written in, and how does it interface with Oracle’s own libraries?
5. What has Pythian’s role been with this project in the past, and how has that changed recently?
6. From a business perspective, why would a company like Pythian want to contribute to this project for free? What is the advantage?
7. How have Open Source technologies benefited Pythian?
8. Do you have any other comments on Open Source, benefits, industry
threats, myths, and so on? Is everything really just free? And
furthermore won’t everyone eventually go the way of a free database?

Check it out!

Cheers,

Paul