Pythian Group

By popular demand, here is my tour of our new World Headquarters.

We moved in today! We’re very proud of it and I’m sure if you check out the video you’ll agree it is pretty Shaktastic. :)

Hi folks. I am back for the second in what will eventually be a long line of infrequent updates. Did you miss me?

End of School with Linux

OCLUG (The Ottawa Canada Linux Users Group) is putting on an event called—you guessed it—End of School with Linux. This is happening on April 28, 2009 starting at 11am at the University of Ottawa in the SITE building, room C0136. The purpose of the event is to help people with their Linux systems, install Linux, fix issues, and just generally help out in the community. Your humble blogger will be there, manning the booth from 1200-1600, so come on down. And tell a friend, too.

More details can be found at the CSSA’s page. Click here for a map of the campus.

Also check out the OCLUG home page.

Ubuntu 9.04 Released

Ubuntu 9.04 was released today. I have not yet looked at any reviews of the release candidates, but I am on my way out to pick up some new hardware on which to install it tonight.

Read the rest of this entry . . .

I’m back again with another in what I hope will be a long line of “Quick Tips for Newbies” series.

At The Pythian Group, we have employees all over the globe, from our headquarters in Ottawa to regional offices in Boston, Prague, India and Sydney, and a few scattered remote workers in Seattle, Paris, Kiev, Brazil, South Africa and Wisconsin, among other places. In other words, we are spread across multiple timezones, and since it wasn’t too long ago that everyone was in Ottawa, this is something that still presents little quirks.

One such quirk involved email generated by one of our internal Oracle instances—via a stored procedure that used UTL_SMTP to send the messages—did not have timezone information in the “Date” email header. As a result, they would be stamped with the hour in Eastern timezone (Ottawa time), but the mail clients would think that hour was local. Depending on where you are relative to Ottawa, this could be many hours in the past or future. Of course, this wouldn’t be noticed if you were in Ottawa or even Boston, both in Eastern. For the rest, it was at the very least, an annoyance—but one that is easily fixed.

Read the rest of this entry . . .

Some of you might know that for more than two years we have had an office in Sydney, Australia. Last year, I had the pleasure to travel there to present at the AUSOUG conference and work from our office in Sydney. It’s been a huge pleasure, especially if you consider what was going on back in Ottawa at that time.

Long story short — I’m moving to Australia. My flight from Ottawa leaves in three hours and I’m all packed and ready to go. Today we had a kiss-goodbye lunch at here at the Pythian office in Ottawa, and I was presented my new role Down Under. Hmm . . .  to be honest, I expected it to be somewhat different:

Read the rest of this entry . . .

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you know that I was at the Hotsos Symposium 2008 this year. You might not know that I also had a chance to take few days off and spend 1+ week vacation in Texas after the symposium — enjoyed the sun and warm weather. My family liked that even more than I did.

Unfortunately, when I was back home last weekend, I discovered pretty unpleasant view from my windows (that’s not basement!):

The view is much better now — I can see some bits of blue sky above a snow bank. So it’s end of March and these days are sunny but freeing — feels like -20 degrees Celsius (below 0 Fahrenheit). My back still hurts from excessive snow shoveling last weekend (so that I can see blue sky from my windows). And… sorry nothing about Oracle — I’m too busy shoveling the snow away from my house so that when it melts next year — I won’t have flooding problem.

I know warmer places do exist! Maybe I should find one?

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.

The Pythian family got a new song last Monday — “Sheeri” means “my song” in Hebrew. This post on my own blog explains how I got the job.

High winds delayed my flight last Monday, and we’ve had two snow storms since I arrived. Luckily, my real-life context switch has not been too difficult. Boston weather is similar — it just feels like deep winter here instead of early winter — and the exchange rate with the US dollar is very close. Even the money is approximately the same form factor, except the “loonie” and “toonie”. Though I don’t think I’m going to convert from Dunkin Donuts to Tim Horton’s any time soon.

There aren’t as many Canadian flags displayed around as there are US flags in the States — odd, since this is the government district. Similarly, Christmas decorations aren’t as overwhelming in this, a Christian country, as in the States, which has a constitutional separation of church and state.

I haven’t had anyone ask me for spare change. There are a lot of Greek and Middle Eastern restaurants around — in one kilometer of Bank Street, there are three different shawarma restaurants. Unlike Boston, though, the predominant pizza is Italian style, not Greek style (Greek style pizza has less sauce, a breadier crust and more cheese, which I am not fond of).

I’ve been working at Pythian for over a week now, and I really like the work model, environment and culture. The Boston office will be set up and ready for me when I come back, which I’m very excited about. The Pythian model of training is “jump right in, and ask questions when you don’t understand something.” The teams are very good technically, and people routinely help each other out. My teammates have been known to work on something I’ve been meaning to get to, and nobody utters a word of complaint. It’s a great workplace and I’m definitely learning a lot about all my team’s different client environments, both MySQL (my area of expertise) and Oracle.