Pythian Group

Thanks to everyone who attended my presentation “Queues, Pools and Caches” at Hotsos 2012. I had a blast and I hope you did too.

I posted the slides and paper on SlideShare for your enjoyment. The paper is by far more complete and contains a lot of material I had to leave out of the slides.

I think the presentation was a bit long to comfortably fit in an hour. In the next iteration I will drop the section about queues and expand more about Connection Pools and Memcached. The audience definitely showed the most interest in those topics.

There were many questions asked after the presentation, so I thought I’ll post a short FAQ to address those:

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Recap from our previous episodes:

A couple of weeks ago, I wake up, skeedaddle to a different country, meet some wonderful people and let my brain soak up talk after talk for three days straight. Lotsa fun all around.

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Recap from our previous episode:

Two Sundays ago, I wake up at a hour that is so intrinsically foul that is has been banned in at least seven timezones. But I’m happy, ’cause I’m gearing up for YAPC::NA 2011, aka my very first YAPC ever (yay!). And because I have no clue that Fate’s bony finger is hovering atop the ‘cancel’ button, waiting for me to get in the trap, waiting for the right moment to stab that key like an epileptic woodpecker (more details on that later). For the time being, all is sunshine and my flights go silk-smooth. Upon my arrival in Asheville, I encounter the Ghost of Past YAPCs, appearing under the guise of Ingy. We agglutinate with other Perl hackers and head for the Crowne Plaza. There I meet fellow canuck Mike and, after a few hours, the early conferencees move to Lab, a local restaurant/pub where I have a very nice plate of nachos covered with bits of ground Bambi. Very yum.

That was day 0. But now, I wake up in a strange (although nice, and provided with complimentary mints) room. I am disoriented, but then I remember: this is Asheville, this is Monday June 27th. This all means that…

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I am freshly back from YAPC, which unlike what you might be thinking, stands for “Yet Another Plane Cancellation” (more details on that later).

I officially landed back on Ottawan ground last Friday, and somewhere around Sunday, I began to write the retrospective of my very first YAPC (spoiler: I loved it). A few hours later, I was still at it. One day and lot of keyboard banging later? Still churning text like a short-circuited matrix printer. By then it was pretty obvious that this was developing into a story larger than the “slam, bang, thank you CPAN” recap that I had originally intended.

At that point, I had a choice. I could either step back, collect my editing wits and rework the text into a concise, informative executive summary of the pertinent parts of my adventures. Or I could indulge in my gonzoer instincts and just splurge into a rambloctious blow-by-blow account of my 144 hours of fun and hugging in Asheville, eschewing factual reporting for a more visceral impressionist take on the atmosphere and spirit of the event.

Guess down which one of those two paths we are now going?

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Blogging from the Speaker Ready room which is now suited on the balcony overlooking the exhibition. I must say that I like the new location. Not only it is closer to the action, but allows you to oversee who is hanging out over the exhibitors.

There’s been a number of interesting sessions, but it’s little things here and there that I learn that provide some real value.

Here’s a few examples

Tomorrow at 8:45 AM GMT time (which is 3:45 AM on my internal EST time clock) I will be doing the updated version of my Memory presentation – “The Answer to Free Memory, Swap, Oracle and everything”. I should perhaps rename it to “Memory Tales from the Middle of the Night” for next year…

Congratulations to Chris Marlowe of Oppenheimer Funds and Bill Mitchell of Alliant Energy, attendees to my Exadata session yesterday.  Both are lucky winners of the a flight with the inimitable Sean D Tucker and the Oracle Challenger.

For those of you who missed the session, keep your eyes on this blog for a recording, coming soon.

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If you’re attending Oracle OpenWorld 2010 in San Francisco, Sept. 19-23, 2010, be sure to stop by one of Pythian’s many sessions.

We’ll be all over the show, with experts Alex, and Marc speaking as listed below. Or, you might find Paul, Alex and others attending the bloggers meetup, participating in Oracle ACE/ACE Director activities, or at some of the User Group or OPN sessions on Sunday. Drop us a line on twitter @pythian while you’re at the show to connect with Pythian.
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I am attending the Professional IT Community Conference – it is put on by the League of Professional System Administrators (LOPSA), and is a 2-day community conference. There are technical and “soft” topics — the audience is system administrators. While technical topics such as Essential IPv6 for Linux Administrators are not essential for my job, many of the “soft” topics are directly applicable and relevant to DBAs too. (I am speaking on How to Stop Hating MySQL tomorrow.)

So I am in Seeking Senior and Beyond: The Tech Skills That Get You Promoted. The first part talks about the definition of what it means to be senior, and it completely relates to DBA work:
works and plays well with other
understands “ability”
leads by example
lives to share knowledge
understands “Service”
thoughtful of the consequences of their actions
understands projects
cool under pressure
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Here’s a matrix of all the videos up on YouTube for the 2010 O’Reilly MySQL Conference and Expo. The matrix includes the title, presenter, slide link (if it exists), video link, and link to the official conference detail page, where you can rate the session and provide feedback that the presenter will see. They are grouped mostly by topic, except for the main stage events (keynote, ignite) and interviews.

If there’s a detail missing (ie, slides, or there are other videos you know about), please add a comment so I can make this a complete matrix. Read the rest of this entry . . .

I’m looking forward to traveling to San Jose for this year’s MySQL Conference. If there’s anything that can trump the drama of conf two years ago, where we observed how Sun would handle its new property, and then the drama of last year, where we observed how Oracle would handle the pending acquisition, it’s going to be the drama around this one — the first MySQLConf since the Oracle/Sun merger has been finalized and approved.

I think there is some finality to the changing of the guard this time, since there aren’t really that many companies that could conceivably swallow up Oracle itself! (Maybe I shouldn’t say that — next thing you know they’ll spin it off heh.) But regardless, I am looking forward to getting to know Edward Screven and getting a sense from the keynote and other communications exactly what he’s planning to … DO … with MySQL.

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