Pythian Group

Hello, my name is Anton Kravchenko. I’m Oracle DBA in Sydney office. After initial months, full of new impressions, charmed by the professionals that are working here in Pythian, i’ve decided that this is the time now when I need to share some of my knowledge, some of my little things, that I was using before. Today I’m going to show two simple procedures that I found useful for me some time ago. I understand that there can be something better, more effective, more elegant solution and I’ll be appreciate for any feedback.

In Pythian we have a lot of different clients, with their unique databases’ schemes. Sometimes some of the clients ask us to implement scripts that change objects in their schemes. And in order to prevent the situation when these scripts hung just because some object is pinned or one or several of the object dependencies are pinned, here is the two simple procedure, that can help to check what we will get during our maintenance.
Read the rest of this entry . . .

You know you’re a geek when…

Pythian is proudly celebrating International Geek Pride Day! According to the Wikipedia, Geek Pride Day is “an initiative which claims the right of every person to be a nerd or a geek”. In this case, I’ll gladly claim my chance to join the party!

Today I’m sporting an X-Men t-shirt in light of my favorite comic book character (love that bad boy Wolverine), and thinking back to the earlier days of my life where my geekiness was a little more apparent than today.

I briefly experimented with COBOL computer programming at summer camp (and I’m sure Paul Vallee will laugh again reading this as I recalled the language erroneously as Cobolt when I told him the story). My newly learned skills netted me a bumble bee image that flew across the screen. Thrilling!

Throughout grade school, I’d run home from school in record time to make the next episode of Spider-Man. During my early teens on Friday nights I could be found at the neighbours house with the local kids absorbed in a game of D&D.

While I may or may not pass for a geek with my tales above, more importantly today is a reminder and another reason for me to celebrate my Pythian colleagues. Even though some are “geekier” than others, they are all wonderful, unique and special individuals in their own right, and so I wear my X-Men t-shirt with pride today in honor of them.

Got a geeky story to share? Would you classify yourself as a geek? Why?
How would you fill in the blank below?
You know you’re a geek when….

Either create a post and link it to this one, or send me an email with a link to your post, or comment on this post with your response.

Thanks for playing.

Singer Wang celebrates with mascot Domokum.

Hello Everyone!

Just to make you smile and let you remember all those sweet holidays I would like to congratulate you and wish you MERRY CHRISTMAS! in Oracle style:

set lines 180 pages 1000
select decode(sign(rownum-24),-1,
       replace(replace(lpad(' ', 25 - rownum+trunc(rownum / 8) * 3, ' ') ||
       rpad('^', rownum * 2 - 1 - trunc(rownum / 8) * 6, '^') ||
       rpad(' ', 25 - rownum+trunc(rownum / 8) * 3, ' '),' ^^^',' ^o^'),'^^^ ','^o^ '),
       lpad(' ', 23, ' ') ||
       rpad('^', 3, '^') ||
       rpad(' ', 23, ' ')
       ) "MERRY CHRISTMAS!"
  from dual
connect by rownum <= 26;

In case you do not have immediate access to SQL*Plus and an Oracle database the expected output is provided below:

> select decode(sign(rownum-24),-1,
>        replace(replace(lpad(' ', 25 - rownum+trunc(rownum / 8) * 3, ' ') ||
>        rpad('^', rownum * 2 - 1 - trunc(rownum / 8) * 6, '^') ||
>        rpad(' ', 25 - rownum+trunc(rownum / 8) * 3, ' '),' ^^^',' ^o^'),'^^^ ','^o^ '),
>        lpad(' ', 23, ' ') ||
>        rpad('^', 3, '^') ||
>        rpad(' ', 23, ' ')
>        ) "MERRY CHRISTMAS!"
>   from dual
> connect by rownum <= 26;

MERRY CHRISTMAS!
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
                        ^
                       ^o^
                      ^o^o^
                     ^o^^^o^
                    ^o^^^^^o^
                   ^o^^^^^^^o^
                  ^o^^^^^^^^^o^
                    ^o^^^^^o^
                   ^o^^^^^^^o^
                  ^o^^^^^^^^^o^
                 ^o^^^^^^^^^^^o^
                ^o^^^^^^^^^^^^^o^
               ^o^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^o^
              ^o^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^o^
             ^o^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^o^
               ^o^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^o^
              ^o^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^o^
             ^o^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^o^
            ^o^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^o^
           ^o^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^o^
          ^o^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^o^
         ^o^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^o^
        ^o^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^o^
                       ^^^
                       ^^^
                       ^^^

26 rows selected.
>

The SQL was written some time ago together with friend of my Maris Elsins

PS I am sure you have you own version somewhere in your library.

Have a great year everyone!

Yury

I must confess, that game I’m leasurely working on is nothing but a big fat excuse to dabble with fun bits of technology that I don’t get to touch with my usual projects. And in that optic, yesterday I fooled around with logging and internationalization stuff.

… Yes, I know. I’m using a game as a pretext to work on logging and I18N. I’m ashamed of myself. But aaanyway, let’s see what I got to discover.

Read the rest of this entry . . .

The Holiday Season was a very Perlish one for me. With two weeks’ worth of vacation time, and my mother-in-law visiting, I had plenty of time to sit down, leasurely sip some hot cocoa and hack my merry little heart away. Net result: four new/updated modules (Catalyst::Plugin::VersionedURI, Dist::Zilla::PluginBundle::YANICK, Dancer::Template::Mason and XML::XSS) and six seven blog entries. And that’s not counting the many acts of random patching, the secret experiments and other such pleasant yak shaving. All Very Good Stuff that makes me Quite Happy.

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This blog entry is based on true events. Only the pattern has been modified to protected the innocent.

A few days ago, I was quietly minding my own business when I noticed something from the corner of my eyes. Strangely, the Knitting Goddess who happens to share my abode did not have the usual mad whirlwind of knitting needles and yarn in her lap. Instead, she was hunched over a pad of paper, a serious crease between her eyebrows, and the pink tip of a tongue sticking out between lips taut with concentration. Curiosity got the better of me. I pushed my chest out and strutted in her direction. Once by her side, I nonchalently rested my elbow on my knee, and asked with a low, husky voice: “Whatchadoing?”.

Read the rest of this entry . . .

After enjoying the excellent hospitality of our host here in Pisa (6 courses) we were ready for our second day at YAPCEU 2010 here in sunny Pisa.

Larry’s new catch phrase “My Language is a four letter word” was the ‘Buzz word’ for today. We settled down to some very interesting talks, the highlight for me being Tim Bunce’s talk on using Devel::NYTProf to Optimize your code. Tim first gave us a quick and dirty overview of optimization which covered the basics of where to start and what to look for he followed up with real examples of Optimizer output and than wrapped up with a few before and after results on an optimization effort.

The rest of the day was dedicated in my opinion, to the future of DBs in with Nelson Ferraz giving an excellent presentation of his concepts for using Perl as to glue for a Data Warehouse application. Next on my agenda, Martin Berends reports on the present state of Perl 6 and interfaces database. There is progress here as we now have some access to the DBI for MySQL and some others. Also great news is the fact there is a good deal of development work going on.

Martin was quickly followed by Tim Bunce again who presented his proposal for the new Perl 6′s DBDI. Seems
we are going to use the JDBC specification with a little tweaking as our road map for the future. Tim also
showed of some Perl 6 black majik from Jonathan Worthington and he was able to how us DBI with DBD::Pg
running on Perl 6.

Allison Randal finished off today’s formal presentations with her “Migration Strategies” presentation. She
gave us some good insight into migration in that we, as developers, cannot force migration on the community. She also provided two examples of migrations: Apache, which took seven years but has almost full buy-in by users and Python, which was quick and dirty but has not received the same buy-in from the community.

Finally we all enjoyed the lightning talks as our wrap up. A number of neat quick ones such as ‘I speak Perl with a ‘c’ accent’, was a highlight for me.

Seems the videos and most of the slides (including my presentation on XS) may be online tomorrow. I will be sure to post them as soon as I see them.

Larry Wall gave another of his unique keynote addresses at the first day of YAPCEU 2010 here in sunny Pisa (yes the place with the tower)

This year was a little diversion from his usual pattern as Larry was assisted by his better half and his demon seed. Larry told us as a language designer his life is one of siting on the fence, not making up his mind until that one little voice in one ear (his better half) and that other little voice in the other ear (his demon seed) work it out somehow.

Larry also showed us some neat little one line Perl 6 tricks for playing perfect numbers. His demon seed seem very keen on ’6′ as it is the first perfect number.

Larry also talked about the latest high tech ‘buzz word’ that the three piece and office window crowd is bantering about these days: ‘Disruptive Technology’.

Something that may do some things bad but others very well.

Of course he pointed out that PERL was labeled the same way when it first appeared some years ago in the UNIX world. As it broke the cardinal rule in UNIX ‘Do one thing well’, Perl did most things sort of ‘OK’ and very sloppy to start, but got much better later. Sort of the idea that worse is better.

He left us pondering PERL 6 as we all know that it does ‘worse’ better and now that ‘worse’ is better it is the ‘worst’ as being better.

Today marks my last day at Pythian. I have been at Pythian for almost three years. In those three years, Pythian’s already thriving MySQL practice has grown even more. I have worked with big and small clients alike, across many industries, managed a team of up to 4 DBAs, and learned a lot not just about MySQL, but what my goals are in general.

Though I am leaving, everything I said in the blog post I made when I announced I was coming to Pythian still holds true. Pythian is a challenging environment and one I would recommend to anyone who finds their current DBA environment boring that they should come to Pythian and experience what it is like to work here. I had lunch with Paul Vallee yesterday and we even discussed possible future collaborations (hence the title, a joke that I am “forking” off of Pythian).

So if it is so great, why am I leaving? It’s simple, really — Pythian is growing by leaps and bounds. I started when Pythian was about half the size it currently is. There is a lot of change happening within Pythian, and I believe it is very good change. However, I enjoyed the environment Pythian was when I started almost three years ago, and personally I am not ready to go with Pythian on the journey it is taking.

So where am I going next? For starters, I will take the month of August off paid work. I have an idea of where I might go for paid work in September, but you will have to watch Planet MySQL for the announcement. During August I will be doing some conference planning and organizing, for OpenSQLCamp in Boston in October first, and then for conferences in 2011. I will also be moving apartments, which is a big task. And I will be focusing on some personal goals, such as spending more time with my husband and becoming more active.

I am excited about having a month off, even though I have a lot to work on in that month.

In The Doom of Multiple Storage Engines, Peter talks about how the storage engine concept of MySQL is usually spoken of in positive terms, but there are many negatives.

I have a hard time trying to figure out the deeper meaning behind Peter’s post, given that Percona writes a storage engine for MySQL, XtraDB. Does this mean that Percona will stop developing XtraDB? Does this mean that the Percona Server will diverge farther and farther away from MySQL so that they’re not compatible any more and migrating from MySQL to Percona Server is very difficult?

Or maybe it’s just that Peter is saying one thing and doing the opposite; which just seems wrong because that would be blatant hypocrisy on Percona’s part.

(This idea was a comment on the blog post but seems to be trapped in the spam filter, so I’m posting it; apologies if the comment comes through eventually….)

My own opinion of the issue: Peter is factually correct with what he says. However, it’s nice to have the framework and be allowed to use more than one storage engine, or use exclusively one storage engine that’s not MyISAM.