Tuesday, October 30. 2012
I feel like I just got back home from Oracle OpenWorld (check out my pictures) and some vacation, but I'll be on the road again next week to attend LinuxCon Europe in Barcelona. I'll be there from Monday (Nov. 5th) until Wednesday evening. Oracle is sponsoring the event and we'll have a booth at the exhibition area (booth #19), handing out free Oracle Linux and Oracle VM DVDs. I'll be at the booth every now and then and plan to give a short introduction and live demo of Ksplice rebootless updates on Monday evening (6:00pm).
Two colleagues and myself will also give some presentations:
I look forward to meeting many people I still know from the SuSE days and to learn more about what's new in Linux - the schedule looks very promising and it will be a tough challenge to pick the right talks. And if you happen to be in Barcelona these days, I'd like to recommend two related events:
- On Monday evening (Nov. 5th, 8:00pm), there will be a "Cluster / Storage / HA Geek Dinner" which I plan to attend. Please get in touch with Florian Haas directly for an invite to the Google+ Event. Thanks to Florian and Lars Marowsky-Brée for setting this up!
- A week later, on Tuesday (Nov. 13th, 7:00pm), there will be a MySQL community event "State of the art in MySQL high availability and replication", including a presentation on the topic by Robert Hodges and Giuseppe Maxia from Continuent, followed by a networking event including beer and snacks.
I wish I could attend that second one as well, but I'll hopefully be back at home by then again...
UPDATE 2012-10-30: The direct link to Google+ Event did not work - Sorry for the inconvenience. Updated the RSVP instructions accordingly.
Tuesday, September 18. 2012
It's that time of the year again — the summer holidays are over and the conference season starts!
I'm very excited to be at Oracle Open World in San Francisco again, where I will pretty busy. On Saturday and Sunday I will attend MySQL Connect, primarily to man the Oracle Linux booth in the exhibition area. But I hope to catch some of the talks as well (I shared my favourite sessions with Keith Larson from the MySQL team in this interview). During Open World, I will help out manning the Oracle Linux demo pods in the exhibition grounds in Moscone South, where we will showcase Oracle Linux with Ksplice and related technologies. I also have a joint presentation with two of our customers about "Top Technical Tips for Automatic and Secure Oracle Linux Deployments" and I've prepared two hands-on lab sessions "Oracle Linux Storage Management with LVM and Device-Mapper" and "Oracle Linux Package Management: Configuring and Enabling Services". Both hands-on lab sessions will actually be run twice. The lab sessions were quite popular last year, I look forward to moderating these again.
In November, I'll be at the DOAG Conference in Nuremberg, to give a joint presentation with my colleague Manuel Hossfeld about "Oracle Linux - best practices and benefits" (in German). We also plan to request a slot for a BOF/Unconference about Linux, I'm curious about the feedback and discussions that will arise during these sessions.
If you happen to be around these conferences and would like to meet, please get in touch!
Wednesday, September 14. 2011
Last week we concluded our first Oracle Technology Network Sys Admin Day in Sacramento (CA). Well, it was actually the second Sys Admin Day, but the first one that had two parallel tracks of sessions about both Oracle Linux and Oracle Solaris.
I helped preparing for the event by creating the Linux lab handbook as well as the VirtualBox appliance of Oracle Linux 6.1 that was used for the exercises. Unfortunately I could not be there in person, but it would have been pointless for me to go on an intercontinental flight just for one day.
From the feedback we've received so far, the attendees really enjoyed the event and were positively surprised about the depth and quality of the practical hands-on lab sessions.
If you've missed the first one and happen to live somewhere in the Seattle area, you have another chance to attend OTN sysadmin day: we'll be hosting another one on Thursday, September 22nd at The Westin Seattle (1900 5th Ave., Seattle, WA 98101). Again, attendance is free, all you need to bring is your own laptop with VirtualBox installed. We'll provide the rest. Space is limited — you can review the agenda and register here!
Friday, September 2. 2011
In my last post, I provided a short review of what I have been working on in the past few months since I joined the Oracle Linux team. Now it's time for a summary of upcoming events! Looking forward, I already have a few more things lined up:
I'll attend and speak at the Oracle OpenWorld 2011 conference in San Francisco in October. I have a joint session with Chris Mason titled Overview: New Features in Oracle Linux 6 where we'll cover the latest developments. I have another joint presentation with my colleague Rob Young from the MySQL product management team titled Using MySQL with Other Oracle Products - this one will give an overview how MySQL has been integrated with the other products in the Oracle portfolio.
At OpenWorld, I'll also do some booth duty (find me at the Oracle Linux demo pods) and I'll also give a number of hands-on lab sessions:
For these labs, I created an Oracle Linux 6.1 VirtualBox appliance and wrote a 70+ page lab manual. I'll be around, aiding the attendees through these exercises.
By the way, a sneak preview of these hands-on labs will be available prior to OpenWorld as well: they are part of an upcoming series of the OTN sysadmin days, free one-day events that will provide practical workshops on both Oracle Solaris and Oracle Linux. We have three days scheduled so far - the first one of these will come up faily soon:
On November 15-17, I'll be at the DOAG 2011 Konferenz + Ausstellung in Nuremberg, Germany. I'll give two presentations (in German):
I'll also hold an "Unconference" (or BOF) about Oracle Linux and the UEK together with Manuel Hossfeld, one of our Linux/OVM consultants.
And finally, I'll be giving a talk about "Oracle Linux and the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel: Status Update and Overview" at the UK Oracle User Group Conference 2011 in Birmingham (UK) on December 6.
If you happen to be at any of these events, please let me know if you'd like to meet!
Despite my best intentions, I haven't posted on this blog for a while, which is a shame! I've become busy writing on so many other places since I moved into my new role in the Oracle Linux product management team in April. I've learned a lot and I am feeling quite at home here! The team is excellent and very nice to work with — I am slowly getting the "Big Picture".
But even though I've been neglecting this blog, there are a lot of things that are publicly visible and document some of my activites:
I've created two podcasts for the Oracle Linux podcasts:
In addition to working the @ORCL_Linux Twitter account and FaceBook page, I've been blogging on the Oracle Linux blog:
From time to time, I'm a guest blogger on the OTN Garage blog:
I also created new content and updated pages on the main Oracle web site and the Oracle Technology Network (OTN):
I've been traveling a bit as well and attended a few conferences where I spoke about Oracle Linux (and MySQL):
I probably forgot a few things in my reflection of the past few months, but these were some of the highlights.
Check out my followup blog post on what I'm up to in the coming weeks and months!
Thursday, June 16. 2011
 fisl12 is likely the largest free and open source software event in Latin America. This year, it takes place in Porto Alegre, Brazil, from June 29th to July 2nd. Oracle is a gold sponsor of the event and I will attend it as a speaker. I feel honoured and excited to be there – for me it will be the first visit to the South American continent.
They already have over 3000 registered attendees, so this definitely is going to be a great conference. There is quite a number of well-known names on the speaker roster and I look forward to meeting a lot of familar faces there.
The agenda is still under development but quite impressive already – too bad I don't speak Portuguese...
I will be giving an introduction and status update to Oracle Linux and as our virtualization technologies Oracle VM and Oracle VM VirtualBox. Other Oracle speakers at fisl12 include:
- Davi Arnaut - MySQL Engineering
- Roger Brinkley - Java Evangelists and the Community Leader for the Mobile & Embedded Community
- John Ceccarelli - Middleware Engineering
- Anil Gaur - VP of Java Platform, Enterprise Edition, and GlassFish Server in the Fusion Middleware Group
- Arun Gupta - Java EE and GlassFish evangelist
- Luke Kowalski - VP in the corporate architecture group
- Henrique Leandro - MySQL Support Engineer
- Simon Ritter - Java Technology Evangelist
- Dave Stokes - MySQL Community Manager
- Dalibor Topic - Java F/OSS Ambassador
It's been a while since my last post on this blog; I definitely need to get back into the habit! One of the reasons for my radio silence was that I switched roles here at Oracle. After having been with the MySQL team for 9 years, I felt it was time for a change. Fortunately I did not have to look far – I'm now a member of the Oracle Linux product management team and I am having a lot of fun there.
However, I realized that while I was an active Linux user on the desktop, quite a lot has happened on the enterprise and data center side of things. Linux has really come a long way and I am glad to be back in this field, drinking from the firehose and learning a lot about recent developments and technologies. For me, this is kind of going "back to my roots", as I have been deeply involved with Linux at SuSE before I joined MySQL in 2002.
Anyway, I'm still alive and you can expect to hear more about Linux and less about MySQL from me on this blog in the future. I also started writing for the official Oracle Linux Blog as well as the OTN Garage blog – watch these spaces for future posts from me, too.
In addition to that, my travel schedule is also filling up again: at the end of this month I'll be speaking at the fisl12 conference in Brasil and Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco later this year. I also submitted talk proposals to the DOAG conference and the UKOUG conference. Looking forward to it!
Friday, April 29. 2011
Linuxtag is likely one of the oldest and largest Linux/OSS events in Germany. I remember having been there to represent SuSE Linux while it still took place at the University of Kaiserslautern, using tables and chairs from the lecture rooms as exhibition stands (this must have been around 1998 or 1999). This year it will take place in Berlin again, and the session schedule looks very promising. I'll be there from Wednesday till Friday and I feel that I will have a hard time deciding which presentations I should attend...
I'll be speaking about What's new in MySQL 5.5 on Friday, 13th of May, at 15:00. If you haven't updated to MySQL 5.5 yet, stop by to hear what new features and improvements have been implemented in this version, which was released in December last year.
In addition to my presentation, there will be two more talks given by Oracle employees:
Wim Coekaerts, SVP of Linux and Virtualization Engineering at Oracle will give the first keynote on Wednesday 11th, 14:00. He'll be talking about Taking Linux into the Clouds — this is a very hot topic and I look forward to this session.
Right afterwards, Dalibor Topic will provide us with an OpenJDK Community Update. If you're a Java developer and you'd like to get the scoop of what's coming, this presentation is one you should not miss!
See you in Berlin!
Thursday, April 28. 2011
The folks at OTN have been very busy — among many others (both virtual and in RL), there are two upcoming developer/sysadmin days about MySQL and Solaris. Both will take place in California next month:
- On Tuesday, May 03, 2011, 8:00am to 4:00 pm, there will be the OTN Developer Day for MySQL in the Oracle Santa Clara Agnews Campus Auditorium. It will cover application development with MySQL, performance tuning tips and managing MySQL environments.
- On Tuesday, May 17, 2011, 8:00 am to 4:00 pm, the OTN's first Sys Admin Day for Oracle Solaris will take place in the Hyatt Regency La Jolla at Aventine in San Diego, CA. Topics include ZFS, security and virtualization using Solaris zones.
Admissions to these events are free and space is limited — so make sure to register fast!
Wednesday, February 2. 2011
It was ready for a while already, but now it's part of the official FOSDEM schedule as well: I am very pleased to announce the presentations and speakers of the MySQL & Friends Developer Room, which will take place this coming Saturday (5th of February) in Brussels, Belgium. This year, our DevRoom will be located in room H.2213 (in the H Building), which has a capacity of up to 100 people and will be available to us from 13:00-19:00 o'clock. We have 12 sessions lined up, each will last 25 minutes (incl. Q&A). Without further ado, here's our schedule:
I would like to thank all speakers for their submissions and for the efforts they are willing to go through in order to make it to this event! If you happen to be at FOSDEM this year, please stop by and join us. We also plan to head out for a meetup over dinner after the event. If you would like to attend, please register, so we can take you into account! (Thanks a lot for Kenny Gryp for organizing this meetup)
Tuesday, January 25. 2011
Just a quick reminder: the Oracle user groups of Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Russia are organizing a joint conference, the Harmony. It will take place on May 19th-20th in Helsinki, Finland. I've met the organizers at the IOUC summit that took place at the Oracle HQ this week and they would love to have some more MySQL content. So if you have an idea for a talk about a MySQL-related topic, please submit it! The call for papers closes on February, 1st!
Thursday, January 20. 2011
My calendar is filling up with speaking engagements about MySQL at various events quickly. Here is a list of events for the coming months where I'll be present:
- On Wednesday, January 26th, I will be speaking about MySQL High Availability Solutions at the San Francisco MySQL Meetup. I feel honored for having been invited to speak there and I'm quite excited that venue is fully booked! I look forward to meeting so many MySQL users in one place.
- On Saturday, February 5th, I'll be attending and speaking at the MySQL & Friends Developer Room at FOSDEM 2011 in Brussels, Belgium. I helped organizing the DevRoom and preparing the schedule for this event. We have a great lineup of speakers and topics, and I will speak about MySQL 5.5 there. I've been to FOSDEM many times before and it's one of the OSS conferences in Europe that I really enjoy coming back for every year.
- On Thursday, March 24th I'll be in Weimar, Germany, attending the "GUUG-Frühjahrsfachgespräch 2011", a conference organized be the German Unix User Group (GUUG). The topic of my session is MySQL Replication Technologies - an Overview (in German). Erkan, well-known member of the German MySQL community will also be there to talk about "Toolbox MySQL", giving an introduction to the MySQL plugin API and technology.
- Finally on April 10th-14th I will be in Orlando, Florida to attend and speak at COLLABORATE 11. Organized by the Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG), this is a fairly large conference covering a wide range of Oracle Applications and Technologies. This year, they have more than 50 sessions on MySQL, provided by both well-known speakers of the MySQL community as well as Oracle employees. The MySQL talks will be given in one track, which spans from Monday till Thursday. So at least one does not have to choose between several interesting MySQL topics at the same time
If you happen to be around at any of these events, please stop by!
I've also submitted a number of MySQL talks for LinuxTag, which will take place in Berlin, Germany on May 11th-14th. I hope that my proposals are being considered and I would like to encourage you to submit one, too! The call for papers is still open until January 25th and it would be great to have some more MySQL content in the program...
Oh, and don't forget to mark your calendars for MySQL Sunday at Oracle Openworld 2011 later this year (October 2nd-6th)! I unfortunately missed last year's event, but this is going to be the conference with the largest MySQL show, lots of news and updates, and plenty of opportunities for networking. You can already register for the event at a "Super Saver" discount until April, 1st here.
Thursday, January 6. 2011
Congratulations to the Drupal community for getting version 7.0 released! This is a major mile stone and an excellent reason to celebrate!
If you want to give Drupal 7 a try without having to install anything, I've now updated my Drupal 7 appliances on SuSE Studio to the latest release. The appliance is based on openSUSE Linux 11.3 and is available in two variants:
- A text-mode only appliance to which you connect using your local web browser via the network.
- A GUI version that starts up the Firefox browser in a minimalistic GNOME desktop to perform the installation locally. Remote network access is available, too.
The database backend is MySQL 5.1, with the InnoDB plugin and strict mode enabled. phpMyAdmin has been added to support web-based administration of the MySQL server. You can access it via http://localhost/phpMyAdmin/. I also added drush, the Drupal command line shell and scripting interface and some additional packages (yast2-http-server, bind-utils, php5-ctype, patch). I also bumped up the appliance's version number to 7.0.0, to match the version number of Drupal included.
The appliance is available in various formats:
- A live raw disk image, ready to be written to an USB stick or flash drive
- A live ISO image, to be burned on a CD or used in a virtual machine
- A hard disk image, to be dumped on a hard disk drive
- Various virtual disk formats, e.g. OVF, VMWare/VirtualBox/KVM and Xen
Please see the installation instructions provided on the download pages for details on how to use the various image formats.
So congratulations to the Drupal developer community for reaching this goal and thanks to SuSE/Novell/Attachmate for providing the infrastructure for creating such appliances. I also would like to especially thank Richard Bos for the testing and many suggestions for improvement of these appliances!
Tuesday, January 4. 2011
I will be in the Bay Area at the end of this month, to attend a summit of the IOUC (International Oracle Users Group Community), to talk about MySQL and to meet with the organizers of Oracle User Groups worldwide. MySQL is a big topic for many members of their groups, I am looking forward to learn more about their activities and how we can better collaborate in the future. My recent experiences at the DOAG Conference in Nuremberg and the UKOUG Conference in Birmingham were quite positive — I was very pleased by the number of attendees at the MySQL sessions.
Since I'm so close to San Francisco, I gladly accepted the invitation to speak at the San Francisco MySQL Meetup Group on Wednesday, 26th of January. The topic of my talk will be "MySQL High Availability Solutions" where I will try to give a broad overview about the technologies and concepts involved.
Last time I checked, they already had 74 confirmations, the venue can host a maximum of 150 people. So if you'd like to attend and meet, hurry up and sign up soon!
Wednesday, December 15. 2010
There has been a lot of buzz about the MySQL
5.5 GA release and its new
features and other user-visible improvements. In this blog post,
I'd like to touch on a less noticeable, but still important change.
CMake has already been used to
build the MySQL Server on Windows for a long time, while the GNU
autotools were used on all other platforms. Since MySQL 5.5, all
builds on all platforms are now performed using the same tool chain.
With the latest release of MySQL 5.5, we've made an important step to
clean up and simplify the MySQL build system: the support for
autoconf/automake has now been removed completely. We've been
performing the release builds of MySQL 5.5 using CMake exclusively
for quite some time already. It became obvious that maintaining two
separate build systems simply had become too much of a burden for our
engineers, especially since the autotools-based builds were no longer
exhaustively tested. This change was outlined in WorkLog#5665
- Removal of the autotools-based build system. We've made this
step in close
cooperation with our community of packagers (e.g. the maintainers
of MySQL packages on the various Linux distributions).
By moving to CMake, we are giving our developers one common build
mechanism for all platforms and there is a lot of new useful
functionality such as out-of-source builds or a GUI for configuring
the build options. And they can now build MySQL in the very same way
that we do it for our own binaries! I've covered the advantages in my
previous blog post about Building
MySQL Server with CMake on Linux/Unix
already. We've also created a general article about CMake
and MySQL as well as an
Autotools
to CMake Transition Guide on the MySQL Forge Wiki. The
description of the source build process in the reference
manual has also been updated to reflect this change.
A big “thank you” should to go to Vladislav Vaintroub
and Davi Arnaut for implementing and pushing the transition to CMake
forward, and to Paul DuBois for creating and improving the
documentation! Wearing my former build and release engineer hat, I am
very happy about this change.
Other CMake-related articles that are worth reading:
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