It is time… Time for one more very special conference for me. Why special?

1. I have never been to ODTUG Kaleidoscope before. I always like new conferences — new experience.
2. Unlike Sheeri, I do not speak! This is one of those rare conferences where I come to slack off, meet old friends and make new ones, go to lots of sessions and actually learn stuff.
3. Coming from the DBA background, it’s not often that I come to development oriented conferences and I think I should do more of that.
4. It’s in Washington, DC. I lived there for some time and have number of good friends there. I’m really excited to see them again!

So what am I going to do there? I just arrived and right in time for the Oracle ACE Directors’ briefing that will run for the whole days of …

OpenSQLCamp is less than 4 months away, and I have finally gotten around to updating the site. Special thanks go to Bradley Kuzsmaul and the folks at Tokutek for getting the ball rolling and making the reservation at MIT. Using MIT means that we will have *free* reliable wireless guest access and projects.

OpenSQL Camp is a free unconference for people interested in open source databases (MySQL, SQLite, Postgres, Drizzle), including non-relational databases, database alternatives like NoSQL stores, and database tools such as Gearman. We are not focusing on any one project, and hope to see representatives from a variety of open source database projects attend. As usual I am one of the main organizers of Open SQL Camp (in previous years, Baron Schwartz, Selena Deckelmann and Eric Day have been main organizers too; this year Bradley Kuzsmaul is the other main organizer). The target audience …

By now you know that there is a MySQL Track during next week’s ODTUG Kaleidoscope in Washington, DC. Ronald Bradford and I organized the schedule at the last minute (Ronald did a lot of the work!). It was difficult to fill a schedule with 19 sessions that are either 1 hour or 1.5 hours long, and to do it I ended up with three presentations.

At each presentation I will be giving away a copy of The MySQL Administrator’s Bible, so be sure to show up! All MySQL track sessions are in Maryland C, and all times are Eastern.

On Monday, June 28th from 4 pm – 5:30 pm I will be presenting …

I found I never published this post as it was sitting in my drafts few months now — it was written in 13th February, 2010. I’m publishing it without any changes.

I learn therefore I am!

I’ve just wrote few bits about learning a new technology and after skimming through my Google Reader, I noticed a great post by Chen Shapira — Deliberate Practice. That’s reminded me about another aspect of learning that I didn’t mention — learning is a continuous process.

There are two aspects…

• No matter how good I am and how much I know, my knowledge and expertize become outdated relatively quickly these days unless I keep up with the new stuff. Unfortunately, there is so much new …

The MySQL track at Kaleidoscope in Washington, DC during June 28-July 1st is set! Here is the schedule, Lincoln VI is the MySQL track room.

Ronald has done a super job and spent a ton of hours in the past several weeks coordinating this effort. Work has kept me much busier than normal, but I have lent some time to the coordination as well. It is a credit mostly to Ronald that we have been able to plan an entire 19-session conference track, complete with confirming speakers, in less than a month. (You may notice the schedule does not have all 19 sessions full, we are just waiting for some more speakers to confirm details.)

Whether …

I have been talking with a group of folks who have been making a product that has lots of free functionality, including the ability to centrally manage many MySQL instances. The administration functions include starting and stopping MySQL, seeing status and system variables, seeing and managing the MySQL config file (/etc/my.cnf), seeing and managing accounts, a small dashboard of overall health graphs, and more.

With this free tool you can look at and manage local and remote databases. It supports ssh tunneling, including ssh using password-protected ssh keys. It’s pretty neat, and I have been working with the product manager to add features. I think this took will become the de facto standard for centralized GUI administration of MySQL.

The tool is
MySQL workbench….Surprise! One of the best new features for the administrator is that you can now create an administration connection for an existing workbench connection …

A MySQL user group member saw that I use Poderosa as my ssh-on-Windows tool, and asked why I did not use PuTTY. My response was that I like having tabbed windows and hate having to keep opening another PuTTY program every time I want to open another connection. With Poderosa I can open a new connection with Alt-N, and I can even connect directly to Cygwin with an icon.

But Poderosa is not the tool I wanted to mention….Another user group member mentioned PuTTY Connection Manager. It wraps around PuTTY and gets the existing saved connections, makes a nicely tabbed browsing window where you can open sessions by double-clicking the connections, which are now listed on the right-hand side.

See screenshot below:

I have not played with …

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 …

The Beacon Pattern:
- This is a “Get out of the business” pattern
- Identify an oft-occurring and annoying task
- Automate and document it to the point of being able to hand it off to someone far less technical

Example:
- System admins were being put in charge of scheduling rooms in the building
- They wrote a PHP web application to help them automate the task
- They refined the app, documented how to use it, and handed it off to a secretary
- They have to maintain the app, but it’s far less work.

The Community Pattern:

- Prior to launch of a new service, create user documentation for it.
- Point a few early adopters at the documentation and see if they can use the service with minimal support
- Use feedback to improve documentation, and the service
- Upon launch, create a mailing list, forum, IRC channel, or Jabber chat room and ask early …

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 …