When: Friday, April 13th 2012 from 9:30 am

Where: Cypress room, Mezzanine Level, Hyatt Regency Santa Clara (5101 Great America Parkway)

What: Drizzle Day is a day to learn about Drizzle, how to use Drizzle, migrating to Drizzle and contributing to Drizzle. If you’re interested in a database for modern web applications, relational databases being deployed in the cloud, advanced replication techniques (such as crash safe replication, multi-sourced replication and being able to consume the replication stream in your application), AlsoSQL (a HTTP interface to a relational database), testing and performance – then Drizzle day is for you!

Price: Admission is free, however the Drizzle team would love you to consider making a voluntary donation between 50 – 150 USD to our SPI account to cover for the costs of this conference: click here to donate. Note that if you are expensing your travel and Percona Live attendance with your employer anyway, you can also expense this payment as a conference fee.

Lunch: There are various options with different prices for lunch inside and outside of the Hyatt. We will provide coffee, tea, beverages and snacks inside the Cypress room both for morning and afternoon breaks. Please let us know of diet or allergy restrictions in your RSVP.

Registrations: Space is limited, so please RSVP right away to ensure you get a spot. RSVP at henrik@drizzle.org so we can plan the space and refreshments.

A draft schedule is on the Drizzle Day website.

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This seems like an appropriate place to mention a few words about the conference organization. The number of people involved is staggering (100+). The logistics — the number of tasks, vendors, contracts, and so on — blows the mind. The upfront cost is literally unmentionable. It’s an exponentially bigger deal in every way than any of the conferences we’ve done before. There is no way to explain it to anyone who isn’t involved. I don’t even comprehend it myself.

Despite this, we are working hard to ensure that the traditions we’ve known and loved for years are continued. It turns out that they all have a very high cost in real dollars. We are constantly faced with hard decisions that always involve “how are we going to pay for this?” I wish that, for example, it could be simple and lightweight to organize BOFs. But there are unions and contracts and room minimums and overtime pay and bundled quotes and restrictions every which way. Nothing is simple, nothing is easy, nothing is cheap — regardless of how simple, easy, and cheap it should be.

And yet, there will be BOFs and dot-org booths and Drizzle Day and all the rest. And the ticket price is a lot less than it was last year. If you appreciate this, you can help by getting attendees to come. Please promote the conference to everyone you know, in every way you know. Use Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, everything. Blog about it. Mention it in-person. Ask your boss to send you and your colleagues, or send your team if you’re the boss. Send email to your meetups and user groups and mailing lists, and ask them to promote it to their networks too. Enough said.

Further Reading:

• There will be an O’Reilly MySQL Conference in April 2010
• I’ll be speaking at the O’Reilly MySQL Conference 2010
• Speaking at EdUI Conference 2009
• The MySQL Conference will be very good this year
• Postgres folks, consider the 2011 MySQL conference

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Admission to Drizzle Day is free, however we recommend that you consider making a voluntary donation between 50 – 150 USD to our SPI account to cover for the costs of this conference: click here to donate. Note that if you are expensing your travel and Percona Live attendance with your employer anyway, you can also expense this payment as a conference fee.

Reflecting the fact that Drizzle 7 has now been out for a year, and Drizzle 7.1 will be released before the conference, the content for this Drizzle Day is geared more towards end users than before. You can learn about unique Drizzle features like true multi-tenancy support, the HTTP JSON interface, and more! Toward the end of the day we also have content that might interest potential contributors and you can end the day by talking to Drizzle developers who are happy to guide you in both using Drizzle as well as becoming an active community member.

Click here for schedule and registration information!

The Drizzle Day follows right after the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo where you will also find Drizzle talks, BoFs and a booth in the Exhibition hall dot-org-pavilion. We would like to thank Percona for sponsoring the Drizzle Day by covering a large part of the costs as well as marketing the event as an official side-conference to PLMCE.

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Henrik has already posted it over on the Drizzle Blog, but I thought I’d give a shout out here too.

We’re holding a Drizzle Day right after the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo in April. So, since you’re all like me and don’t book your travel this far in advance, it’ll be easy to stay for the extra day and come and learn awesome things about Drizzle.

I’m also pretty glad that my employer, Percona is sponsoring the event.

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For those that don’t know: linux.conf.au is one of (if not the) most awesome technical conference in the free software space. It consistently attracts a wide variety of very knowledgable speakers and a large number of attendees.

Every year it is put together by a (different) set of volunteers, and this means it also tours around the country (and sometimes even New Zealand). This year it was in Ballarat – a regional city a couple of hours drive out of Melbourne. One of the great things about LCA is that you are not always at the same hotel, in the same city stuck with the same two restaurants.

This year had a bit of an increased focus on privacy, security and basic freedoms and human rights. This is no doubt a reaction to the increased attacks on freedom of speech and the internet that have been going on in recent months.

That being said, there were a huge number of great talks on a variety of topics – everything from filesystem performance to open hardware, to repurposing existing hardware to upcoming challenges for the kernel to howto be a better sysadmin. In fact… for those who weren’t there and spend any of their life helping people admin machines – go and watch those talks.

linux.conf.au (for me) is one of the cannot-miss events in the year. It’s an opportunity to learn things that directly apply to my work, may apply in the future and most certainly will never apply but are rather cool anyway.

All the video from the conference are already up! This is an amazing effort from the (volunteer) AV team. I’ve included links to a selection of talks below that I especially think are worth watching:

Watch no matter what:

• Keynote – Karen Sandler
  This keynote was amazing. Go watch it. The organisers did a truly excellent job at selecting keynotes this year.
• Keynote – Jacob Appelbaum
  This is best described as a tour of internet freedom, the attacks on it and a tour of the modern surveillance state.
• UEFI and Linux: The future is here and it’s awful
  You will be depressed at some point in this talk – the news is not great for the future of even being able to easily boot free software on machines.
• Paul Fenwick’s Keynote
  A good quick introduction to hacking your brain. I’m sure many of you (like me) are interested in ways to hack our brains and our bodies to better serve us. This talk is merely an introduction. I also suggest you check out Anki if you want to improve your ability to remember things.
• Torturing OpenSSL
  This was certainly one of the most amazing talks I saw. A whole new interesting way of attacking SSL. Vary CPU voltage, extract private SSL keys! Wheee!
• The Kernel Report – Jonathan Corbet
  You can skip this only if you read every single mail on LKML, run your own analysis on the kernel source tree and publish an (at least) weekly publication on Linux.
  This is one of the few (err… only) talks that is repeatedly accepted into linux.conf.au. Why? Because Jon manages to compress a whole year of activity in the Linux world int oa single session that is incredibly informative.
• I Can’t Believe This Is Butter! A tour of BTRFS
  This is going to be the default filesystem in a number of places over the next few years, time to start learning! While it’s unlikely to be suitable for database workloads anywhere in the near future, I suspect we’ll see BTRFS as the root filesystem and XFS as the filesystem for the database server in the not too distant future.
• Mistakes Were Made
  This session explores a number of rather indispensable things for those in operations – but also leaks over into development. Learning from our mistakes can only make us better at doing our jobs.
• Hack Everything: repurposing everyday devices
  This was great fun – reuse existing hardware to do awesome things!

Talks that could be quite interesting for you, depending on your interests:

• XFS: Recent and Future Adventures
  This talk covered a lot of the recent improvements in XFS. Especially interesting for those with metadata heavy workloads.
• Bloat: How and Why UNIX Grew Up (and Out) – Rusty Russell,Matt Evans
  This is a pretty neat examination of where bloat comes from taking V6 UNIX utilities as the baseline. It would be interesting to have a similar study on the database servers we all love and use.
• Migrating to PHP 5.4
  Probably quite useful if you’re dealing with PHP (although I wasn’t in this session).
• Finding vulnerabilities in PHP code (via static code analysis)
  This one is for our web developers. It’s only a 20minute talk, so you should really all go and watch it. Various static analysis tools are part of the normal toolkit for C and C++ development these days, it’s great to see people working on them for other languages.

Talks I shall be watching the videos of as I was in another talk at the time:

• Smashing a square peg into a round hole
• Codec2: Open Source Speech Codec
• Desktop Home Hacks
• This Old Code, or Renovating Dusty Old Open Source For Fun and Profit
  This is especially interesting as I both know Greg and have talked to him about this work *and* because of my experience with the Drizzle project – we certainly have encountered more than our fair share of dusty old code during our time working on Drizzle.
• Mentoring: we’re Doing It Wrong

My Talk:

• Multi-tenancy, multi-master, sharding, scaling and analytics with Drizzle
  An update as to what we’ve been working on getting going in Drizzle.

All the videos are going up at:

• http://www.youtube.com/user/linuxconfau2012/videos

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We’ve gotten really good feedback on this tool, including this nice mention on Stack Exchange:

Percona just built a tool to do just that called the Configuration Wizard. I tested it out once just to see what it would return and the results were pretty darn close to what we were using on our servers, whose cnf’s were put together by highly trained mysql certified dba’s.

So what’s changed in the new version of the Configuration Wizard? Quite a few things. We’ve rolled out the first iteration of the account and profile features. Now you get a homepage with your configuration files, so you can manage them and return to them anytime you like.

From this page (click on the image for a fullsize view) you can do things like sharing configuration files and emailing them to yourself. The new release also adds features like downloading the configuration files so you don’t have to copy-paste them.

If you share a configuration file, then the URL can be loaded by anyone, even if they’re not logged in. It’s kind of like sending someone a link to a pastebin or something like that. Screenshot:

Another new feature is something I’ve wanted for a long time: the ability to generate a more strict, safer configuration file. There’s a new page in the Wizard that lets you set a lot of sanity/safety options to prevent common problems MySQL users run into because of too-permissive MySQL behaviors. These are the kinds of things that Drizzle fixes — and should be fixed by default in MySQL — but never will be because they might break applications that rely on the default behaviors. If you’re building an application from the ground up, now you can prevent bad things from getting a nose under the tent. Here’s a screenshot:

In addition to these things, we have added a number of other features you might not notice, which I won’t spend much time on — they’re things like an integrated feedback form at the left of the page and so on.

What’s next? Well, next I think we’re going to turn our attention to adding new tools, rather than improving this one. I have a list of tools that people have requested or suggested: a SQL formatter, a visual EXPLAIN tool, a configuration advisor, a query analysis tool, a way to register a server’s essential characteristics and then get advice when there’s a new release that might be beneficial for you, and so on. I have selected the next priorities, but I don’t want to spoil the surprise or promise something if it turns out to be harder than I think it will be. What ideas do you have? Let me know by leaving your feedback in the comments.

We hope this suite of free browser-based tools helps you become a more productive MySQL user and administrator!

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We have many talks which are covering Oracle MySQL, and forks such as MariaDB, Drizzle and Percona Server are well covered too. You will also have a chance to learn about commercial MySQL alternatives such as Clustrix and SchoonerSQL from our sponsors.

At the same time this is the conference for MySQL Community. We’re talking about other database systems only as it comes to migration to MySQL and about NoSQL technologies such as Memcached,Redis,Sphinx which are commonly used to supplement MySQL.

The space was very tight this year and competition was very tough. We had over 300 proposals for approximately 60 slots. As results committee had to make a lot of very tough choices and many great talks could not be accommodated.

We have a great Conference Committee this year who has done a great job getting the schedule together. I can’t thank them enough !

See you in April in Santa Clara for MySQL Conference and lets make this event an amazing success !

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(And speaking of stuff you can download, phpMyAdmin 3.5.0-alpha1 now supports Drizzle!)

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