Last week I posted a MySQL Connect Guide for Developers. This week I am focusing on DBAs. The conference is about 2/3 administration/maintenance talks and about 1/3 development, with some overlap of course. Gerry and I did a lot of recommendations in OurSQL Episode 104, but that was before the schedule itself was up, so now I can present a list of session-by-session talks for developers who are building their schedules.
So here’s a guide to MySQL Connect for administrators, with times. Note that these are handpicked from what I think administrators would be interested in. There are many more sessions than the ones listed here, so head on over to the Schedule Builder to build your own schedule:
Saturday, September 29th:
9-10:30 am
MySQL Connect Keynote: The State of the Dolphin by Tomas Ulin, VP and Edward Screven, Chief Corporate Architect, both of Oracle. I am pretty excited to see where Oracle is taking MySQL next!
11:30 am – 12:30 pm
There is a session if you want to learn What’s New In MySQL 5.6. Everyone thinks that there will be a new 5.6 release out (though we are all wondering if it will be a DMR, beta or release candidate release), so this will be a great session to go to, to learn about any new features released.
MySQL Optimizer Overview by Olav Sandstå. Get in depth as to how the optimizer works, so you have the knowledge to tune your server and queries.
There’s also Ronald Bradford’s session on Lessons from Managing 500+ MySQL Instances. Ronald always has great tips and tricks to make administering MySQL less painful and avoid problems.
1:00 – 2:00 pm
If you are a beginner, you will want to attend the Hands-on Lab Getting started with MySQL presented by Gillian Gunson and Alfredo Kojima, to learn the MySQL architecture, how to install and configure the MySQL server, and how to query and back up the database. You will also learn about error messages, accounts, datatypes, simple SQL statements and how to import data into and export it from the MySQL server. And remember, you are doing this all in front of a computer, because this is a hands-on lab. This hands on lab runs from 1-3:30 pm, so there is plenty of time to learn and do a lot!
Even if you are not a beginner, you are sure to learn some great Replication Tips and Tricks from Mats Kindahl. Mats will present a bag of useful tips and tricks related to the MySQL 5.5 GA and MySQL 5.6 development milestone releases, including multisource replication, using logs for auditing, handling filtering, examining the binary log, using relay slaves, splitting the replication stream, and handling failover.
I am personally excited for Rick’s Rules of Thumb by Rick James. Rick is always a great speaker and I learn so much from him!
2:30 – 3:30 pm
Backups are the single most important maintenance tool for MySQL. Hema Sridharam and Svetlana Smirnova present Save your Data: How to Make MySQL Backups. There are several tools to perform MySQL backups, including mysqldump, Oracle’s MySQL Enterprise Backup, third-party applications, and OS methods.
Henrik Ingo will speak about Evaluating MySQL High-Availability Alternatives, including replication, MySQL Cluster, DRBD, Tungsten and Galera. He will speak about the trade-offs of each method and why you might want to use each one, so you can decide what’s best for your environment.
And of course there’s Peter Zaitsev’s Optimizing MySQL Configuration, which is not-to-be missed!
4 – 5 pm
I am personally interested in Patrick Galbraith’s Database Resources On Demand, covering the concept of DBaaS, how an organization can use it, and what it means for DBAs for management and for developers in how they use database resources. Among the other topics it addresses is how open source technologies such as OpenStack provide an infrastructure that can be used in DBaaS.
Lately, solid-state disk drives have been getting a lot of attention. Vadim Tkachenko will speak about MySQL and Solid-State Drives: Usage and Tuning, covering SSD internals and how they affect database performance.
If you want to get your hands dirty with MySQL Cluster, join the Hands-on Labs by Santo Leto called Get Started with MySQL Cluster, where you will learn by doing: install, configure, administer, and access MySQL Cluster.
5:30 – 6:30 pm
If you want to know what replication features are coming up in MySQL 5.6, make sure to check out Lars Thalmann talking about Enabling the New Generation of Web and Cloud Services with MySQL 5.6 Replication. This session showcases the new replication features, including group commit and multithreaded slave for high performance, crash-safe slaves and failover utilities for high availability, global transaction identifiers and annotated row-based replication [RBR] for flexibility/usability, and event checksums for data integrity.
I have to promote my own session! I’m presenting Google-Hacking MySQL, which takes an in-depth look at using white-hat Google hacking techniques to show you what the “bad guys” can do. White-hat google hacking is the good kind of hacking, where you have permission. You will learn about the following hacking strategies and how they are done: SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), cross-site request forgery (CSRF), gateway vulnerabilities, and social engineering—all without violating Google’s terms of service.
If you want to migrate your systems to MySQL, there is a presentation by Sergio Andres De La Cruz Rodriguez about Migrating from Microsoft SQL Server to MySQL: The New MySQL Migration Tool.
6:30 – 8:30 pm – MySQL Connect Reception in the Continental Ballroom
And there are Birds of a Feather session (BoFs) too!
Sunday, September 30th
8:30 am – 9:30 am
MySQL Perspectives Keynote featuring Twitter‘s DB Team manager Jeremy Cole, PayPal‘s Chief Architect Daniel Austin, Verizon Wireless‘ IT Director and DB Architect/Engineer, Ash Kanagat and Shivinder Singh, who will share their experiences and perspectives. I think this is going to be fascinating, and well-worth having to wake up early to get to the venue at 8:30 am.
There will be a special panel after that, but it has not been announced yet, so it looks like there is a hole in the schedule (but there is no hole!)
10:15 am – 11:15 am
Most of us have a shortage of DBAs. If you are in that situation, you probably have more money than time on your hands, so check out Rob Young’s talk on Optimizing Security, Performance, and Availability with MySQL Enterprise Edition. Yes, MySQL Enterprise Edition costs money, but it is much easier to buy it than to hire a top-notch DBA, which are rare in this world.
If you are a beginner DBA, attend the Hands on Lab entitled Focus on MySQL Replication, taught by Sven Sandberg and Luis Soares During this hands-on lab, you will learn how to get started, how replication works, and the best practices and tools. You will also learn about architecture, advanced replication configurations and some of the new features in the MySQL 5.6 development milestone releases. This session goes until 12:45, so you have a good 2.5 hours for the hands-on work.
Calvin Sun talks about Better Availability with InnoDB Online Operations, including online operations for schema changes such as add index, drop foreign key, and rename column.
11:45 – 12:45
Linas Virbalas and Robert Hodges of Continuent talk about Replicating from MySQL to Oracle Database and Back Again.
If you are into MySQL Security, Joro Kodinov will present MySQL Security: Past and Present. Since the description includes MySQL 5.6 security features, I would have called it “Past, Present and Future”.
Thinking of deploying, or already deployed, Galera? Then do not miss Seppo Jaakola’s talk on Galera Cluster Best Practices.
1:15 – 2:15 pm
Inaam Rana presents InnoDB Performance Tuning, which includes the newer features in MySQL 5.5 and the upcoming features in MySQL 5.6, including unique InnoDB architectural elements for performance and how to tune InnoDB to achieve better performance.
There is a world of tools designed to help make MySQL administration easier, so check out Charles Bell’s hands-on lab about MySQL Utilities where you can experiment with the tools.
My particular favorite for this time slot is Oystein Gravlen’s Query Performance Comparison of MySQL 5.5 and MySQL 5.6. I cannot wait to see how much improvement there is, and why!
2:45 pm -3:45 pm
Profiling with the Performance Schema, given by Mark Leith, will teach how to set up and use Performance Schema to perform everyday profiling and performance monitoring tasks, such as: finding problem queries; researching blocked hosts; profiling I/O usage; analyzing resource usage by schema, table, or user; or tracing a session to see exactly where it spends its time.
Alexander Rubin will talk about critical performance tuning information during In-Depth Query Optimization for MySQL.
Personally I’m not a fan of use cases, which are sessions like “how X company does Y with MySQL”, but since I’m giving one entitled Database Scaling at Mozilla, I should probably promote it. And I will note that these sessions are usually well-attended – I guess people want to see how the big players do things, even though they are only appropriate for about 5% of the DBAs out there. I will note that Mozilla has relatively small databases and high traffic, so our needs are similar to more DBAs out there, and hopefully our solutions will work for them.
4:15 – 5:15 pm
Grant McAlister of Amazon.com presents Durability Is Key: How to Protect Your Data from Corruption where he describes the differences between logical and physical corruption in MySQL and shows how to best protect your MySQL database from both types of corruption.
My former coworkers, Francisco Bordenave and Marco Tusa of Pythian, are presenting on Scaling MySQL with Multimaster Synchronous Replication, where they explain how they investigated and designed an architecture based on MySQL to support an application that served shops around the globe and to scale out and scale in, based on sales seasons.
Jonathon Coombes presents the hands-on lab MySQL Security: Authentication and Audit, a hands-on lab that starts with an introduction to the authentication plug-in API and how it works, then tries an example HTTP authentication plug-in. The lab takes you thorough setting up a Pluggable Authentication Module (PAM) plug-in to access the server OS user definitions. Then you will walk through the MySQL audit plug-in API and how it works, and experiment with the Oracle audit log plug-in and various events it can log. Participants will build and experiment with their own plug-in that forwards MySQL events to the OS logging APIs (syslogd on Linux and Windows Event Log on Windows).
5:45 – 6:45 pm
Tokutek’s Bradley Kuzsmaul defines big data as “several times as large as main memory”. If you have big data, check out his talk on Solving the Challenges of Big Databases with MySQL.
Luis Soares teaches about using replication for high availability in Scaling for the Web and Cloud with MySQL Replication
Or, get information about fulltext search with Sphinx from the horse’s mouth – Andrew Aksynoff talks about Full-Text Search with MySQL and Sphinx.
From 7 – 9 pm on Sunday, there is the Taylor Street Open House, which is JavaOne’s opening event and our closing event.
It’s going to be an amazing event with tons of technical content. I feel like I have written a lot here, but these are simply the sessions I’m having trouble choosing between, or wish I could go to. There are tons more sessions than what I’ve written about!