Colin Charles Agenda

It was a big April if you’re in the MySQL ecosystem, so am looking forward to other events that have different focus and a different base, so to speak. See you at:

• rootconf – May 11-12 2017 – Bangalore, India. My first Rootconf was last year, and it was a great event; I look forward to going there again this year, to talk about capacity planning for your databases. If you register with this link you get a 10% discount.
• Open Source Data Center Conference – May 16-18 2017 – Berlin, Germany. I’ve enjoyed my trips to OSDC in the last few years, and they’re on their last tickets now – so register if you plan to go!

• I’m thrilled to naturally be at Percona Live Europe Amsterdam from Oct 3-5 2016. I have previously talked about some of my sessions but I think there’s another one on the schedule already.
• LinuxCon Europe – Oct 4-6 2016. I won’t be there for the whole conference, but hope to make the most of my day on Oct 6th.
• MariaDB Developer’s meeting – Oct 6-8 2016 – skipping the first day, but will be there all day 2 and 3. I even have a session on day 3, focused on compatibility with MySQL, a topic I deeply care about (session schedule)
• OSCON London – Oct 17-20 2016 – a bit of a late entrant, I do have a talk titled “Forking successfully”, and wonder if a branch makes more sense, how to fork, and what happens when parity comes?
• October MySQL London Meetup – Oct 17 2016 – I’m already in London, I wouldn’t miss this meetup for the world! There’s no agenda yet, but I think the discussion should be fun.

We had the first MariaDB Berlin Meetup on Tuesday 12.04.2016 at the Wikimedia Berlin offices at 7pm. More or less there were over 54 people that attended the event, a mix of MariaDB Corporation employees and community members. We competed with the entertainment at the AWS Summit Berlin which was apparently about 400m away! Food and drink were enjoyed by all, and most importantly there were many, many lightning talks (minimum 5 minutes, maximum 10 minutes – most were about 6-7 minutes long).

The bonus of all of this? Lots and lots of slides for you to see. Grab them from the Google Drive folder MariaDB Berlin meetup April 2016.

1. Monty talked about improving the speed of connections to MariaDB Server, some work he’s just pushed fairly recently to the 10.2 tree.
2. Dipti spoke about MariaDB ColumnStore and it is now clear we’ll see some source/binary drop by the end of May 2016.
3. Sergei Petrunia and Vicentiu Ciorbaru spoke about the upcoming window functions that MariaDB Server 10.2.0 will see (yes, the alpha should be out real soon now).
4. Jan spoke about InnoDB in 10.2.
5. Lixun Peng spoke about a fairly interesting feature, the idea to flashback via mysqlbinlog and how you can have a “Time Machine”. I can’t wait for flashback/time machine to appear in 10.2. The demo for this is extremely good.
6. Kolbe spoke about data at rest encryption using the MariaDB Amazon AWS KMS plugin.
7. Sanja and Georg went up together to speak about 10.2 protocol enhancements as well as what you’ll see in Connector/C 3.0.
8. Wlad gave us a good rundown on authenticating with GSSAPI, something you will notice is also available in MariaDB Server 10.1’s later releases.
9. Johan Wikman gave us an introduction to MariaDB MaxScale, which started off the talks on MaxScale.
10. Markus talked about the readwritesplit plugin.
11. Massimiliano went into the Binlog server.
12. Martin didn’t use slides but gave us an amazing talk titled “Rival concepts of SQL Proxy”; it was very well given and I’ve encouraged him to write a blog post about it.
13. Community member Ben Kochie, an SRE at SoundCloud gave us a quick talk on Monitoring MySQL with Prometheus and how much they depend on the PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA.
14. Diego Dupin spoke a little about the MariaDB Java Connector, and the idea was to do a demo but the projector via HDMI seemed to be a bit wonky (this was also true of using my Mac; the VGA output however worked fine). So it was just a quick talk without any deck.

We ended with a quick Q&A session with Monty dominating it. Lots of interesting questions around why the name Maria, licensing thoughts, ensuring all the software we have are in distributions, etc. Some ended up going for pizza while others ended up in a hotel bar at the Crowne Plaza Potsdamer Platz — and the chatter went on till at least 11pm.

Thanks again to Georg Richter who found us the venue and also did a lot of the legwork with Wikimedia Foundation.

Come meet the MariaDB Server and MariaDB MaxScale developers in Berlin (April 12 2016), talk about new upcoming things in MariaDB Server 10.2, as well as the next MariaDB MaxScale releases. Let’s not forget the talks about the upcoming developments with the Connectors.

It will be a fun-filled, information-packed night. Food & drink will be provided.

For more information and the opportunity to RSVP check-out our meetup page. RSVP soon as we only have 99 spaces available.

I have a few speaking engagements coming up in April 2016, and I hope to see you at some of these events. I’m always available to talk shop (opensource, MariaDB Server, MySQL, etc.) so looking forward to saying hi.

• A short talk at the MariaDB Berlin Meetup on April 12 2016 – this should be fun if you’re in Berlin as you’ll see many people from the MariaDB Server and MariaDB MaxScale world talk about what they’re doing for the next releases.
• rootconf.in – April 14-15 2016, tutorial day on 16 – I’ve not been to India since about 2011, so I’m looking forward to this trip to Bangalore (and my first time to a HasGeek event). Getting the email from the conference chair was very nice, and I believe I’m giving a keynote and a tutorial.
• Percona Live Data Performance Conference 2016 – April 18-21 2016 – this is obviously the event for the MySQL ecosystem, and I’m happy to state that I’m giving a tutorial and a talk at this event.
• Open Source Data Centre Conference – April 26-28 2016 – Its been a few years since I’ve been here, but I’m looking forward to presenting to the audience again.

There’s some prep work for some internal presentations and tutorials that I’ll be running in Berlin at the company meeting as well.

I was fortunate enough to have some free time earlier today evening, and headed over to the Martin-Gropius-Bau to catch the Ai Weiwei (@aiww)exhibition titled Evidence. This is the first time I’ve seen Ai Weiwei’s work as I missed it at the Tate Modern in London a while back.

He is a modern artists. Playing around with a lot of different materials to come up with his artwork. And he makes use of the Web. I guess his claim to fame is that he’s all for freedom of speech & expression (something that’s hard to do in China – a dissident he is, if you must), and the fact that he’s a documenter of modern happenings (everyone is interested at the amazing pace of growth in China – he shows that by video recordings of highways, or driving around and recording his journey as an example).

For me, I was really moved by Zodiac Heads (Circle of Animals). I would so grab the rat, tiger and dog as examples! 

China in ten years (I first went to Beijing in 2004 – it has changed a lot in a decade) has become a lot more materialistic. The car of choice used to be the Audi; it still is, but you find a lot of other luxury vehicles on the roads nowadays in Beijing. So the Han Dynasty vases painted with metallic paint from BMW & Mercedes was great for cultural insight. Culturally, the want of antiques is also high and the Table & Chest with stripped chairs was also interesting – remove 1mm sheen from Ming Dynasty furniture and they look like new. What is the purpose of antiques again?

I enjoyed his Study of Perspectives (a selection at moma) as well. He goes to famous landmarks and takes a photo with his left middle finger.

He portrays the disputed islands (between China & Japan). I loved the stools because they each tell a story (6,000 of them). I enjoyed his re-enactment of how he was held captive by the Chinese authorities for some time. It’s shocking to see how you would sleep with a light on, always be watched by security guards and have everything covered up – where you have to do your own laundry and the only thing you get are 6 hangers. Its sad to see that his studio in Shanghai was demolished at a moment’s notice – but he made artwork out of it. He showed the evidence that was confiscated (lots of laptops/video recorders/PCs).

A protest pre-demolition involved river crabs (he xie). Guess that’s the beauty of the Chinese language :)

If you get the chance to check Ai Weiwei’s work out, its well worth it and will take you a good 2 hours (read a review in The Economist). You can’t take photos inside, but you will leave with a lot of memories. If you can’t see this one in Berlin, check out a video: Ai Weiwei – Dumbass. At five minutes long, it makes my video of the week.