I had the pleasure of speaking on two excellent podcasts:

OurSQL

No need for me to introduce this podcast. I just have to say it was only when I interviewed that I realized the amount of work taken for producing one single cast. Kudos to Sheeri & Gerry and Rich Goyette the sound producer and thank you for your kind hospitality!

You can find the cast on OurSQL Episode 129: New and Extended, where we speak about the upcoming Percona Live MySQL Conference & Expo, 2013.

Reversim

This is an Israeli, Hebrew speaking podcast, and is undoubtedly the queen of Software Development podcasts here. Run by two enthusiast, veteran, open source keen developers, this is a must hear podcast

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It happened last year at the previous Conference, and it's going to happen this year as well.

There will be a session of lightning talks during the conference, for the joy of both the audience and the speakers.

Lightning talks are fun and instructional micro events. Their official purpose is to give the audience a chance to learn something in a very limited amount of time. The real purpose is for the speaker to be as entertaining and memorable as possible within the allocated time.

The call for participation is open from now until February 10th. If you have something that you want to say in not more than 5 minutes, you can SUBMIT A PROPOSAL.

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Thank you to all who attended my talk at Percona Live London!

The slides from my talk are now made available, following: Slides: common_schema, DBA's framework for MySQL. Also available on slideshare.

They should also be on the Percona Live site within a few days.

On Monday afternoon, Neal Armitage and I will be speaking at Percona Live in London. It will be a three hours tutorial about Tungsten replicator.

The contents of this tutorial are mostly new. We have released recently a new and easier way of installing different topologies, in the shape of cookbook scripts, which are distributed with the replicator tarball.

Using this cookbook, any user can simply install multiple topologies, from the simple master/slave to all-masters, fan-in, and star.

There are recipes for showing the replication cluster, switching roles between master and a chosen slave, taking over MySQL replication, installing direct slaves with parallel replication, testing each topology, and

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I'm happy to be speaking about common_schema at Percona Live London, Dec 4th, 2012. This will be the first chance for me to speak about common_schema, what I believe to be an extremely useful companion to your MySQL server.

I will show you how common_schema can leverage your SQL skills and give you new powers. Stuff you had to be SQL-Perl-super-expert to work through is easily attainable with common_schema and QueryScript. Some maintenance, security and auditing tasks are now a breeze. Writing server side scripts can be fun!

What I won't do:

• Read the fancy manual aloud
• Walk you through every possible view,

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After a long pause in the speaking game, I am back.

It's since April that I haven't been on stage, and it is now time to resume my public duties.

• I will speak at MySQL Connect in San Francisco, just at the start of Oracle Open World, with a talk on MySQL High Availability: Power and Usability. It is about the cool technology that is keeping me busy here at Continuent, which can make life really easy for DBAs. This talk will be a demo fest. If you are attending MySQL Connect, you should see it!
• A happy return for me. On October 27th I will talk about open source databases and the pleasures of command line operations at

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Are you attending PerconaLive?

Allow me to suggest you attend the Common Schema: a framework for MySQL server administration session on April 12, 14:00 - 14:50 @ Ballroom F.

This talk is by none other than Roland Bouman. Roland co-authored parts of common_schema, and is a great speaker.

I have a personal interest, of course, being the author of most of the components in common_schema. I would like to convert you to a supporter of this project. I know a few very smart people who think this project is an important tool. I would like more people to get to know it. Eventually, I would like developers and DBAs alike to consider it

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Am now back from Percona Live, London. Here are some quick impressions of mine.

The physical location of the conference was excellent, not far from Tower Bridge. The conference area itself was nice and has good atmosphere. Very well organized. Kudos to Percona!

Theme

The official theme for the conference was "Discover the Power of MySQL". However, looking back at the conference, I think the de-facto theme was "High Availability and Scale Out for MySQL".

Why do I say that? Look at the sponsors of the event; look at the talks. There were talks by and about Clustrix, Tungsten (parallel replication), Schooner, Choosing a HA solution (by Henrik), Fusion-IO, MySQL Cluster, MySQL in the Cloud, Galera Replication, Scalebase, Spider, MHA, Various HA Solutions (by Oli

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Here are the slides from my talk Programmatic Queries: things you can code with SQL held on October 25th on the Percona Live event, London.

Programmatic Queries: PDF

I wish to thank those who attended my talk.

The topic of the talk was irregular and, to some extent, controversial. Should one really rely on internal implementation for optimizing her queries? Sergei Golubchik was quick to suggest that even in current and coming versions of MariaDB, some things I spoke about may not hold true. I

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I'll be speaking at the Percona Live event, held in London, October 24, 25, 2011.

My session is called Programmatic Queries: things you can code with SQL. It's a short 30 minute talk, in which I present underlying knowledge of the programmatic nature of SQL queries within MySQL, and how to take advantage of such knowledge so as to build faster, shorter, and sometimes unexpected queries.

This is not about stored routine programming, a classic programmatic aspect of MySQL, but rather about expected order of execution: of row evaluation, of control flow statements, of table inference, of time issues.

I have

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Pythian is pleased to announce our speaking schedule at this year’s Oracle OpenWorld 2011, October 2-6, 2011 in San Francisco, CA.

We’re excited to be joined by our customers Western Union, and Worldwide Technologies (WWT) as we present real-world experiences and project success. If you’re attending, don’t miss the chance to hear our team of experts. Bring your toughest questions to be answered as they relate to any of the subjects below.

• Follow Pythian on LinkedIn for up to date OOW info
• Schedule a meeting with Pythian at OOW to

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It’s a busy summer at Pythian, with our continuing wave of speaking sessions at upcoming community and regional industry events.

Coming to a city near you, watch for Pythian presenting hot Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server database topics:

IN CANADA:

Oracle Technology Days – Montreal
August 9, 2011 – 8:30am – 1pm, Hilton Montreal Bonaventure

• 11:00 am – Join Marc Fielding for Mixed Workload Management for Oracle Exadata
• More Pythian Oracle Exadata resources
• View the Evite
• Register/Inscrire

Oracle Technology Days – Toronto
August 25, 2011

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On Thursday, February 10, at 10am PST, there is a free webinar about Managing Big Data with Percona Server, XtraBackup and Tungsten. Quoting from the announcement:

Big data is a big problem for growing SaaS businesses and large web applications. In this webinar, we'll teach you how to set up Percona Server, XtraBackup, and Tungsten to manage Terabyte+ databases and scale to millions of transactions a day. We'll discuss the latest features for high transaction performance like InnoDB buffer pool dump/restore and HandlerSocket, our favorite tricks for backup, restore, and provisioning of large data sets, and how to replicate scalably and safely using Tungsten Replicator with parallel apply.

The presenters are representatives of both



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If you're in the Los Angeles area on Feb 15, come hear my talk at LAMySQL inspired by learnings from real-life experiences. In addition to hearing a very unique and interesting talk, you can win an AppleTV thanks to awesome folks at @NoodleYard.

Real-Life Use Cases From Data Administration Hell

Data is the most valuable asset of an organization because it's irreplaceable.

Yet, we hear about f**k ups related to data administration every day by startups and organizations of all sizes. Sometimes it's no one's fault. Sometimes it's the fault of a drunk friend who shouldn't have been [wherever he was] at the first place.

Yet, at other times, the disaster could have been prevented. Sometimes, these f**k ups are







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I will present two talks at the MySQL Conference next April.
One is a three hours tutorial on Advanced MySQL Replication Techniques, and the other is a normal session on The art of sandboxing. Reducing Complex Systems to Manageable Boxes.
The first topic is not a first to me. But the contents are going to be fresh and new. There has been so much going on in the replication field, that the talk on this topic that I presented in 2007 looks like ancient history.
The second topic is completely new. I have often presented the result of my sandboxing efforts, but I have never thought of explaining the techniques themselves. Now that I have got some experience at reducing differently complex systems to sandboxes, I want to share the knowledge, to promote more work in this field.

On Friday, October 15th, the third OpenSQLCamp in North America will start at 6pm with a social event and then continue with more technical stuff over the week end.
Compared to the overcrowded Oracle Open World with its 45,000 attendees, this event may look like a desert. But the quality of the attendance will more than compensate for the missing thousands.
The event will be held with unconference style. There is a list of sessions, where I have proposed


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On June 10th and 11th I attended two interesting workshops, both related to the Italian Free Software conference, and both organized by private institutions that have expanded their boundaries and created two quite lively international events.
The first event was held near Pula, in an innovation laboratory encased in a beautiful forest. The Technological Park of Sardegna Ricerche is a place where research and business boil together to produce new companies and to help consolidate existing ones.
The workshop was titled A community for a new business model and it was a show case of a dozen companies, both local and from

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In January 2010 I will attend Linux.Conf.Au, which this year is held in Wellington, New Zealand.
It's a long way from Europe to New Zealand, and so I will take a few stops.
On January 13 I will be in Dubai, UAE. If you are around, I would love to organize a MySQL meeting. I haven heard back from the local user group and it seems that a meeting will take place. Stay tuned for more.
On January 15th I will be in Sydney. The organizers are already at work. We will





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Codebits is approaching. Form December 3rd to 5th, this gathering of 600 developers for a conference, which is also and foremost a competition, will occupy the mind of the best coders in Europe.
I will be a speaker, with two sessions:

• Schema maintenance in MySQL, focusing mainly on MySQL Workbench, but with an introduction to the other choices.
• Introduction to Gearman - a distributed, language and OS independent system for dynamic programming.

Also Lenz will be there, and quite busy. He will also have two sessions:

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The first Free Software Conference in Kosovo is being held on August 29-30 in Prishtina, Kosovo.
The newborn state, which declared independence in 2008, is growing in several ways. Besides economic and political growth, also technology is expanding. In this fresh environment, free and open source software can have an important role.
The conference schedule includes local and international speakers.

I have a strong professional and personal relationship with Kosovo. Before and after the war, from 1998 to 2002, I was part of the OSCE-UN mission





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For the fourth time in a row, I will be speaking at FrOSCon, one of the most charming open source events in Europe.
Hosted in the bright environment of the Department of Computer Science of the University of Applied Sciences Bonn-Rhein-Sieg, this event will get you hooked from the beginning. The organization is done by volunteers, who have always done an amazing job, with even better results than more expensive and famous conferences.
This year, there will be some more action than ever before. In addition to the main event, the organizers have given away a few developers rooms, to let some projects build their own event within the main one. There will be a Java


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I am going to Madrid, Spain, to participate in the Open Communities Forum on June 18-19.
As usual with Sun open events, the agenda includes several actors in the open source arena, such as MySQL, Java, Open Solaris, with topics ranging from web development to mobile integration.
It looks promising, and I look forward to this event, which is my first one in Spain.
On the first day, I will do an introductory talk about MySQL, and a more technical workshop for advanced users. The second day will be mainly dedicated to meeting users in the area, but I will also do a guest appearance in a talk about



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The session at the Boston MySQL User Group was very enjoyable. There was a full room, and the presentation was followed with attention and curiosity.
The slides I used for this presentation include the deck used by Allan Packer and Mikael Ronström at the MySQL Conference 2009, followed by a testimony of my own experience with 5.4.
Here is the final deck: MySQL 5.4 theory and practice

While preparing the slides, I realized that, for the first time, we have a product that allows a painless performance gain. Unlike all the tuning and technological improvements






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