Pythian Group

pipes, daemons, just another typical sysadmin day, really

This Thursday, I’ll be presenting at the Ottawa Valley SAGE meeting. The topic of the talk will be Perl for Sysadmins, and I’ll try to sell to the audience how Perl can make their lives much, much easier.

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Most of the time, I hack applications together because I have an itch that badly needs scratching. But, sometimes, I also build up apps for the sake of trying out and experimenting with new technologies. The process I’m following for those latter apps is what I call Awesome Driven Development, or A.D.D. for short. Basically, I just let my inner Hammy take over and just go wild with the shiny.

Generate slides with Dancer, Markdown and Slippy

This particular app begins with the discovery of Slippy, a jQuery-based slide presentation system. It seems a little more easier to use than S5, which was up to now (with the help of Pod::S5) the best alternative I had found.

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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 . . .

On Thursday, January 21, Pythian hosted the Ottawa Valley System Administration Guild (OVSAGE) Ottawa Valley System Administration Guild (OVSAGE).

The highlight of the meeting was an interesting presentation on security by the founder of OVSAGE, Scott Murphy. The focus was on the fact that security is a mindset, not a product. Scott’s presentation looked at a large number of security issues and explained in detail while technology alone cannot fix security issues. The presentation was a response to the Amrit Williams Blog post Top 10 Reasons Your Security Program Sucks and Why You Can’t Do Anything About It.

Scott’s presentation can be viewed here: security-quagmire-pdf. I hope you find it useful.

Last month at the Boston MySQL User Group, I went through the meanings of INNER, LEFT/RIGHT OUTER, CROSS, NATURAL joins, how to do a FULL OUTER JOIN in MySQL, and what STRAIGHT_JOIN means. I also explained how to recognize when you want those types of joins, and best practices for the semantics of writing joins and design patterns. Subqueries were explained in this session, and some examples of how to think differently so that you end up writing JOINs instead of subqueries. The slides (slightly different from the slides in the video — due to error correction) can be found at http://technocation.org/files/doc/2010_01MySQLJoins.pdf.

Here’s the video:
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The O’Reilly MySQL Conference & Expo 2010 Call for Participation ends in just under 3 weeks. I am on the conference committee, and thus get to see and review all the conference proposals.

This blog post will briefly explain the how each part of the proposal is used, then have a list of what not to do in your conference proposal, and end with a checklist of questions to go over your proposal before submitting. Click here if you want to skip to the checklist.

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Giuseppe Maxia and I are in the exact middle of our leg of theMySQL Campus Tour. Yesterday’s session was recorded:

A PDF of the slides can be downloaded at http://technocation.org/files/doc/2009_04_Tour.pdf (21 Mb).

Click on the thumbnails for larger pictures of the standing-room only crowd, and lunch with the great folks at Cal Poly afterwards:

Links referred to in the presentation, or related to the presentation:
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At the March Boston MySQL User Group meeting, Jacob Nikom of MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory presented “Optimizing Concurrent Storage and Retrieval Operations for Real-Time Surveillance Applications.” In the middle of the talk, Jacob said he sometimes calls what he did in this application as “real-time data warehousing”, which was so accurate I decided to give that title to this blog post.

The slides can be downloaded in PDF format (1.3 Mb) at http://www.technocation.org/files/doc/Concurrent_database_performance_02.pdf.

This talk discussed how to do real-time retrieval operations while doing concurrent high volume insertion, including:

• How to keep up with 1.5 Mb/second per server incoming data stream
• server hardware comparison between a multi-core AMD Opteron and a multi core Intel Xeon
• MySQL/Postgres comparison
• schema design
• design of the storage/retrieval benchmark
• tuning MySQL

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I am back on the road, going to RMOUG Training Days to present The Answer to Free Memory, Swap, Oracle, and Everything.

I am quite excited, as the RMOUG schedule (PDF) looks quite promising, especially these presentations:

• Further RMAN Optimizations in 11g — Stephan Haisley
• Advanced Oracle Troubleshooting: No Magic is Needed — Tanel Poder
• Understanding Oracle Execution Plans: How SQL is Really Executed — Tanel Poder
• The SAN is Guilty until proven otherwise — Gaja Krishna Vaidyanatha

Some of these overlap, so I guess I will have to make a difficult choice.

I hope to see you all in Denver.

Brian Aker delivers the keynote speech at OpenSQL Camp: State of the Open Source Databases. The presentation begins with a disclaimer:
“There is no way I’m going to tell you exactly where the future of databases go. We have way too many egos in the room to ever even begin a discussion…”
and ends with Aker saying,
“What the hell does that mean?”

View the video online at
http://technocation.org/node/649/play
or download the 42.6 MB Flash video file (.flv) directly at http://technocation.org/node/649/download.

My summary: Read the rest of this entry . . .