Cha, Cha, Changes

As some know I left MySQL Support last week and started working for Kaplan Professional as their MySQL DBA.

To all my old colleagues at MySQL Support – I miss you. You have been my friends, teachers, mentors and co-conspirators. Thank you for everything and don’t be strangers.

To my new colleagues at Kaplan, thank you for the wonderful opportunity you have given me. I look forward to learning and working with you

Tek

Man time goes by fast. Only about a week left before Tek. I have to admit to being rather excited about it. I will be giving a tutorial on Optimizing MySQL Essentials that will cover many areas including queries and the server. I also have a regular session called “Why be Normal” that will be an intro into data normalization.

Both of these talks are new for me, so it has been quite a lot of fun putting things together. I hope you will come out and join me and others of the PHP Community at Tek. If you haven’t registered for it yet, there is still time. So get out there!

Voices of the Elephpant

Crazy but true – I am on Voices of the Elephpant this week. I had a great time talking with Cal about PHPWomen, so be sure to check it out!

And if you know someone who is one of the unsung members of the PHP Community, be sure to nominate them for an interview at http://voicesoftheelephpant.com/nominate-a-voice/

MySQL’s undo log

Short Braindump:
– undo log == rollback segment
– everything kept within the tablespace
– primarily for removing data changes that had been written to disk when a crash occurred, but should not have been written, because they were for uncommitted transactions.”
– “History list length 6 is number of unpurged transactions in undo space. It is increased as transactions which have done updates are commited and decreased as purge runs. ” – comes from http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2006/07/17/show-innodb-status-walk-through/
– number of undo log entries for a specific transaction can also be found in the TRANSACTION section of INNODB STATUS

References:
1) http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/MySQL_Internals_Files_In_InnoDB_Sources – “Some Notes About Structures”
2) http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/innodb-multi-versioning.html
3) http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/innodb-multiple-rollback-segments.html

Dutch PHP Conference 2011

I am pleased and proud to announce that I will be presenting at this years Dutch PHP Conference from May 19th to the 21st in Amsterdam, Netherlands.

I will be giving a tutorial on the basics of optimizing MySQL along with a session on character sets. I, in particular, look forward to the tutorial since it covers areas that I find fascinating – query and server optimization.

On a personal note, neither I or my husband have ever been to Amsterdam before. So since we have never yet had the opportunity to play tourist there, my husband plans to join me on the trip for the conference. We hope to play tourist while there and at least see the Van Gogh museum. Though hopefully we will get to see much more then just that.

BarCamp Orlando is announced!

I missed last years BarCamp Orlando since it was being held Easter weekend. This year I am hoping to make it!

This year it will be Saturday, April 2, 2011 from 9:30 am to 6:00 pm at:

Wall St. Cantina
19 N Orange Ave
Orlando, FL 32801

Not sure if I will present yet.. But thinking about it.

PHP Benelux Conference

I have to admit – I am both pleased as punch, and jealous as heck that my colleague, Geert Vanderkelen, will be presenting a MySQL Performance Tuning tutorial at this years PHP Benelux Conference.

Lots of stuff will be discussed, including configuration, understanding status variables, finding bad queries, schema tips, etc.

Wonder if he will let me steal away in his luggage?

Presenting at Day Camp for Developers

I am honored to announce that I will be presenting at Day Camp 4 Developers #2: Telecommuting.

I will be presenting on what for me is a constant struggle – to balance your home and work life when you telecommute. I must admit that I and my family fight with this every day.

If you want learn more about telecommuting, what is involved, what tools are needed and how to talk to your boss about setting up a telecommuting program, I hope you will consider joining us!

Collaborate 2011

I am very pleased to say that I have been accepted to speak at Collaborate 2011. This is an Oracle conference that is being held in Orlando, Florida and is run by the Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG), the Oracle Applications Users Group (OAUG) and Quest International Users Group (Quest).

All of my previous presentations have to this point been at conferences that are primarily targeted at the PHP coders of the world. As a member of that community, I have always felt comfortable there – talking to and with PHP coders.

This however, seems to be a different kettle of fish.

This Oracle conference seems to be rather large (5000+ according to the site) with lots of content on many different subject areas. I am not sure if that is a good or bad thing, but I definitely intend to cruise through the various tracks and sit in on sessions that I normally do not have exposure to (BI/Data Warehousing, Master Data Management, and Professional Development).

That being said, I wish it was possible for me to also be attending the MySQL User Conference. It is being held the same week as Collaborate in Santa Clara, California. I will miss catching up with many of my good friends as they attend the user conference while I am at Collaborate. But I know that there is always next year.

Zend Con

I sat through a number of sessions while at Zend Con this year and they were all wonderful. As a MySQL person I have to admit a preference to anything DB related – just to give you a heads up…

Day 1:
- Documents, documents, documents by Matthew Weier O’Phinney. I particularly enjoyed that this was focused on the software architectural design and was system agnostic for the document database.
- Technical Debt by Elizabeth Naramore. Her no nonsense discussion and interaction with the audience kept this discussion interesting and engaging. The ideas and concepts discussed were something that every developer and manager should understand.
- Demystifying PostgreSQL by Asher Snyder. I have been wanting to look at PostgreSQL for years, I just never seem to have the time to do it. This was a nice intro to the system and its capabilities which I have to admit, are pretty dang cool.

Day 2:
- EXPLAIN – yeah it was my own talk, but hey – I was there!
- Pragmatic Guide to Git by Travis Swicegood Travis is a gifted speaker that manages to draw you in with his enthusiasm. His clear logical walk through of the basics of Git covers all the commands that a beginner will need.
- Infobright DB by Jeff Kibler This was a talk that I originally went to mostly out of curiosity. Once they started I found myself highly interested (data warehousing and mining is an interest of mine) not just for what they did – but how they did it.
- Welcome to the Dark Side: We have Brownies by Josh Holmes. The talk was informative, engaging, and just all around fun. Turns out Microsoft isn’t so bad after all… I mean – they had brownies even

Day 3:
Umm – slept late and then just practiced my last talk… Since it was on the last set of talks on the last day..

Missed a number of keynotes – did some volunteer work manning the PHP Community booth, but really enjoyed the “Dries” and “ROI” ones.

The various parties/after-parties (official and otherwise) were awesome with more then a few hangovers showing up the next day.

And as a minor side note – I also really enjoyed the Running MySQL at Scale tech talk at Facebook while I was there. Learned quite a bit and also got to see Domas again. I missed his brand of craziness.