On Monday, October 12, 2009* from 7-9 pm at MIT, I will be giving a presentation explaining SHOW ENGINE INNODB STATUS for the Boston MySQL User Group. There is information about foreign keys, transactions, deadlocks and mutexes just waiting to be discovered, and I will show how to decipher the information.
For all those in the Boston area, I hope to see you there! For those who cannot be there, we will video this presentation and make it available online, and post here when the video/slides are up.
*Yes, I realize that this is a bank holiday in the US.
Where:Please make sure to RSVP (even “Maybe”) so that we know how many are coming! Sydney Mechanics School of Art Level 3, 280 Pitt Street Sydney 02 9262 7300
I’m very excited to announce a very special guest at this user group meeting!
Arjen Lentz is in town doing his Sydney training program 7-Sep to 9-Sep and kindly agreed to drop by and talk about something interesting in the MySQL world – be it a technical topic or the state of the MySQL community eco-system.
For those of you who are relatively new in the group – Arjen has actually kicked-off the Sydney MySQL User Group few years ago. Arjen has been Australia’s earliest MySQL AB employee. He lives in Brisbane and is visiting Sydney for just few days so this is a unique opportunity to meet him personally unless you are a lucky student enrolled into his training program classes that week.
We are starting at 5:30pm with pizza and beer and some mingling around. Around 6:00pm, we should be in the condition to move into a more formal discussion led by Arjen. The finish should be by about 8:30pm.
Please don’t forget to RSVP and answer the question at the RSVP form on what topics would you like to discuss the most.
At the July MySQL User Group, Eric Day and Patrick Galbraith spoke about Drizzle, a lightweight, microkernel, open source database for high-performance scale-out applications, and Gearman, an open source, distributed job queuing system.
The July meeting of the Boston MySQL User Group will feature Eric Day, a prominent Drizzle developer, talking about Drizzle and Gearman:
In this talk we will discuss two growing technologies: Drizzle and Gearman.
We will explain what the Drizzle project is, what we aim to accomplish, and an overview of where we are at. We will also be introducing the fundamentals of how to leverage Gearman, an open-source, distributed job queuing system. Gearman’s generic design allows it to be used as a building block for almost any use – from speeding up your website to building your own Map/Reduce cluster. We will tie Drizzle and Gearman together and demonstrate how they work in a custom Search Engine application.
In the wake of Meetup.com changing their sponsorship agreements, Technocation, Inc., an international not-for-profit group, has set up a fund for user group sponsorships. You can use the button below to donate any amount of money in US funds via PayPal:
(all monies sent through that button will be earmarked as a directed donation to the “User Group Fund”. In the interest of not cluttering up this blog post with a Donate button for each currency, you can use PayPal to send funds in *any* currency to “donate@technocation.org”. Just be sure to specify if you want the money to go to specifically to the User Group Fund.*)
Note that meetup.com’s fees are $144 per year ($12 per month).
Four years ago, MySQL and Meetup.com entered into an agreement. I have no idea of the details of this sponsorship, though from reading in between the lines, I believe the sponsorship was an in-kind sponsorship — that is, no money exchanged hands, but there were mutually agreed upon benefits. I have no idea what the benefits to Meetup.com were — publicity or free consulting, perhaps.
MySQL AB has an agreement in place with meetup.com to cover the organizer fees. Simply click at the link at the top of the meetup.com page to request your electronic voucher so you can become an organizer.
Unfortunately, this agreement has ended, so there’s going to have to be a more manual process to get MySQL to sponsor the meetup groups. At its cheapest, a year of meetup.com is $144.
The good news is that Giuseppe and Dups (as well as the local Sun/MySQL folks in Boston who also sponsor the pizza and soda we have) have expressed that they are dedicated to sponsoring these user groups, so nobody has to go around digging for spare change just yet.
Here’s the sad e-mail I received:
from Meetup Support
to sheeri
date Mon, May 4, 2009 at 5:52 PM
subject Greetings from Meetup Support (KMM1797374I15977L0KM)
mailed-by meetup.com
Hello Sheeri,
Thanks for your patience while we looked into this!
I did some research and My SQL will no longer be sponsoring Meetup
Groups. Therefore, you’ll need to purchase a subscription plan in order
to continue hosting the Group on Meetup.com. Sorry about that! Read the rest of this entry . . .
I’m on the train coming back from Sydney SQL Server User Group April 2009 meeting — SQL Server 2008 Security Deep Dive by Peter Ward. The event is held at the same venue where I organize Sydney Oracle Meetups (actually, it’s another way around — I learned about this place by attending the previous SSUG meeting) and it’s the top quality venue especially for the money they charge.
The presentation in two parts was exactly what an Oracle DBA like me would need to have a peek into the security territory of SQL Server. I was afraid it would be really “deep dive” and assumed lots of SQL Server knowledge but I was actually fine. I think it would be cool to have a full day real deep dive and looking at what Peter was talking about, I’m convinced that he could keep going further and further into details should we give him more time.
I learned that SQL Server security model is somewhat complex and it’s still not clear for me what is what in all these server logins, database users, schemas and etc. are doing and what are relationships between them but, again, there is just an Oracle DBA inside me. As David Lean, the voice of Microsoft there, explained — it’s historical. Indeed, SQL Server must be old enough now to have some history! ;-) Read the rest of this entry . . .
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.
Day 2 finished yesterday. It was quite a busy day, with some excellent sessions.
Battle of the Nodes: RAC Performance Myths — Riyaj Shamsudeen
A great presentation on popular RAC myths, with some great examples. Excellent visuals that made complex processes look simple. I really liked this one.
Getting the Most Out of AWR — Tim Gorman
A first-rate session attended by a lot of the conference. It went into detail on what scripts are available to extract AWR information without needing Grid Control or Database Control. For command-line lovers, it’s great.
The SAN is guilty… until proven otherwise — Gaja Krishna Vaidyanatha
A very important session for all DBAs, showing the end-to-end components involved in database I/O. There are so many more components that can cause problems between the database and the physical spindles. Concepts, case studies, plenty of information.
Understanding Oracle Execution Plans: How SQL is Really Executed – Tanel Poder
One of those eye-opening sessions, starting with how to read SQL Execution Plans, and moving to showing stack traces and mapping function calls, to Execution Plan steps. A must-see for everyone tuning SQL.
And that is it. As exhausting conferences are, I always wish for them to have been longer.
