Colin Charles Agenda

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’ve been a Flickr Pro subscriber since 2005. I consume 75.36GB of storage, spread across 25,765 photos. I spent a lot of time on it since 2005, creating albums, joining groups, etc. I love the product and I’m paid up till 2018 and do not intend to stop subscribing to Flickr Pro. But I’m worried about Yahoo! and their future.

I read the Wired piece on how to get your photos off Flickr and thought it might be nice to have a backup of photos using their new Camera Roll feature. Simply put, I can get my data out but it involves me clicking “Select all” quite a lot. This is not a good solution naturally.

I found flickrdownloadr, a Mono app. It installed quickly on the Mac, it pulled in a whole bunch of Mono libraries, but after an initial login with Flickr, I would get an unhandled exception (you can’t tell from the GUI, it just crashes silently; I manually ran the app from /Applications/flickrdownloadr).

Unhandled Exception:
System.Net.WebException: Error: SendFailure (Error writing headers) ---> System.Net.WebException: Error writing headers ---> System.IO.IOException: The authentication or decryption has failed. ---> Mono.Security.Protocol.Tls.TlsException: The authentication or decryption has failed.
at Mono.Security.Protocol.Tls.RecordProtocol.ProcessAlert (AlertLevel alertLevel, AlertDescription alertDesc) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
at Mono.Security.Protocol.Tls.RecordProtocol.InternalReceiveRecordCallback (IAsyncResult asyncResult) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
--- End of inner exception stack trace ---
at Mono.Security.Protocol.Tls.SslClientStream.EndNegotiateHandshake (IAsyncResult result) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
at Mono.Security.Protocol.Tls.SslStreamBase.AsyncHandshakeCallback (IAsyncResult asyncResult) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
--- End of inner exception stack trace ---
--- End of inner exception stack trace ---
at System.Net.HttpWebRequest.EndGetResponse (IAsyncResult asyncResult) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
at System.Net.HttpWebRequest.GetResponse () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
at FloydPink.Flickr.Downloadr.Logic.UpdateCheckLogic.UpdateAvailable (FloydPink.Flickr.Downloadr.Model.Preferences preferences) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
at FloydPink.Flickr.Downloadr.Presentation.LoginPresenter.ApplyUser (FloydPink.Flickr.Downloadr.Model.User user) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
at FloydPink.Flickr.Downloadr.Logic.LoginLogic+<CallApplyUser>c__async0.MoveNext () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0

It looked like the fix might have been related to this github issue and the best way to fix it was: mozroots --import --ask-remove. I did that. I tried mozroots --import --sync, especially after reading the Mono Security FAQ, but to no avail.

Turns out, the fix was cleaning out Flickr’s Sharing & Extending — there were accounts that had access for companies that had closed down (remember Qoop anyone?). But weirdly, there were two varying “flickr downloadr” authorisations (one had a version string attached to it).

Glad that was fixed but it seems like an app that would take a long time to actually get going. My next plan is to install this on a Linux box and sync it to an always on box. Presumably all this will “just work”, since Mono/GTK looks the same everywhere.

Its a shame that Flickr doesn’t provide an easy exit path. I mean I cancelled my Basecamp account not long ago, and it was not the refund bit that impressed me the most — it was the fact that I could take all my data out, and it would be a generated ZIP file that I could unzip and consume in my browser. Things just worked.

Here’s to Flickr’s long future. And I guess, Yahoo!’s…

There are a few upcoming speaking gigs this March 2016:

• flossUK Spring Conference – 15-17 March 2016, London
• FOSSASIA – 18-20 March 2016, Singapore

Two talks in London and one keynote in Singapore, while I will also moderate the database track on the last day of the conference as well. I’ve never been to flossUK before, but the schedule looks very interesting and I’m looking forward to it. FOSSASIA is an event I’ve been going to regularly since it was held in varying places (Vietnam, Cambodia, before finally settling down in Singapore) so this is an always exciting time.

Would happily meet you to talk shop, feel free to drop me an email: colin[at]mariadb.com.

Yearly reviews happen but when you’re moving in a fast paced world like the Internet (they say every 3 months on the Internet is like a real world year, right?) its nice to keep track of what happens from time-to-time.

Back in the good ‘ole days of Monty Program Ab, we kept up this idea of “weekly reports”, which included time spent, because according to the Hacking Business Model that meant you would add it all up, multiply it by a VIP number, and find out how many shares you would gain. This had the nice tradeoff that you would count how much you’ve worked, and watch how much time you’d “overwork” (or underwork) in a 2-week period, and anything in excess of 75 hours was noted in a field called “balance hours”. You could then take this time off at your will, just like vacation time (which was extremely generous at MPAb). Bottom-line: you were rewarded for every bit of time you put into the company!

Long story short, since quite a lot of the work I do is public-facing, I might as well try keeping logs of what happens in a public fashion, no?

Short January, I spent half of it on vacation (year end thing) and the other half working. February was a little longer but I also spent a week on vacation. Got to love all the public holidays that are peppered in-between.

• Spoke at SCALE14x, did some booth duty, got to catch up with a few colleagues and people within the community. Big mistake for me is coming back from a long vacation only to go to an event within the same week — makes it hard to prep material as well as deal with deluge that is one’s INBOX.
• Attended MonkiGras, which focused on making stuff, and I was truly inspired. Again great networking.
• Attended FOSDEM, splitting time between the distributions and MySQL & friends tracks, as well as the main conference. This is a huge event, and meetings happen everywhere (I even did some breakfast meetings). Another highlight was of course the MySQL Community Dinner which was great to be at, good food made with love, wonderful beer and not to forget that MariaDB Corporation was also a sponsor.
• Attended ConfMgmtCamp which is proving to be a truly great add-on to FOSDEM. Ghent is nearby, the content is amazing, and this is stuff we have to always focus on.
• Meeting with Kaj (MariaDB Corporation) in Munich. 1:1 was short, as we also had Product Manager Ralf Gebhardt join in.
• Visited Sofia, Bulgaria for the first time — Bulgarian Web Summit is a huge event with over 800+ attendees and they really enjoyed learning about MariaDB Server (spent about as long as the talk after it, answering questions).
• Applied to and approved for Google Summer of Code 2016, so we are a mentoring organisation again.
• Contributed to an upcoming whitepaper for MariaDB Corporation.
• Answered 17 questions from prospects and customers that sales (engineering) bumped up to us; 1 support question; many from marketing
• Sent various people slides for them to repurpose things for webminars, or just look at it for reference material
• Talk about Planet MariaDB with marketing; no we don’t run it. But yes, it would be nice if there were more filters applied to it.
• MariaDB Server won Database of the Year for the LinuxQuestions forums.
• Many people are interested in InfiniDB from Japan to Bulgaria.
• Talk about the Paris & London roadshows; agree to participation.
• Got my account on the The MariaDB Knowledgebase fixed; there’s SSO now so I guess the only thing that has a different account now is Jira.
• I don’t report as many bugs as I would like, but here’s a few: MDEV-9458: FR: Super read-only mode, MDEV-9582: FR: Ansible galaxy roles, and MDEV-9658: FR: Add RocksDB as a storage engine to MariaDB Server.
• I made a few posts to the lists, but the one I’m most happy about was Aliasing slave_parallel_workers/slave_parallel_threads. Why? Because within a week, there was discussion, this was done and pushed to 10.2. I’m also hoping we start seeing Time delayed replication appear soon. Transportable tablespaces is something still to investigate when it comes to documentation.
• Blogged:
  1. SCALE14x – lots of MySQL content there
  2. FOSDEM 2016 – See you in Brussels
  3. Donating to an opensource project when you download it
  4. SCALE14x trip report
  5. Amazon RDS updates February 2016

I think one of the big announcements that came out from the Amazon Web Services world in October 2015 was the fact that you could spin up instances of MariaDB Server on it. You would get MariaDB Server 10.0.17. As of this writing, you are still getting that (the MySQL shipping then was 5.6.23, and today you can create a 5.6.27 instance, but there were no .24/.25/.26 releases). I’m hoping that there’s active work going on to make MariaDB Server 10.1 available ASAP on the platform.

Just last week you would have noticed that Amazon has rolled out MySQL 5.7.10. The in-place upgrades are not available yet, so updating is via dump/reload or using read replicas. According to the forums, a lot of people have been wanting to use the JSON functionality.

Are you trying MySQL 5.7 on RDS? How about your usage of MariaDB Server 10.0 on RDS? I’d be interested in feedback either as a comment here, or via email.

SCALE14x was held at Pasadena, Los Angeles this year from January 21-24 2016. I think its important to note that the venue changed from the Hilton LAX — this is a much bigger space, as the event is much bigger, and you’ll also notice that the expo hall has grown tremendously.

I had a talk in the MySQL track, and that was just one of over 180 talks. There were over 3,600 people attending, and it showed by the number of people coming by the MariaDB Corporation booth. I spent sometime there with Rod Allen, Max Mether, and Kurt Pastore, and the qualified leads we received were pretty high. Of course it didn’t hurt that we were also giving away a Sphero BB-8 Droid.

The MySQL track room was generally always full. We learned some interesting tidbits like Percona Server 5.7 would be GA in February 2016 (true!), the strong crowd at the MariaDB booth and quite a bit more. People are definitely interested in MySQL 5.7’s JSON functionality.

The highlight of my talk, The MySQL Server Ecosystem in 2016 was that it brought along quite a good discussion on Twitter. Its clear people are very interested in this and there is much opportunity for writing about this!

The Mark Shuttleworth keynote

But there were other SCALE14x highlights, like the keynote by Mark Shuttleworth. It was generally a very moving keynote, and here are a few bits that I took as notes:

• Technology changes lives
• Society evolves because it becomes possible to live differently
• New software moves too fast for distributions (6 months is too long). Look at Github. Speed vs. integration/trust/maintenance (the work of a distro)
• snapcraft 2.0 (learn more about your first snap): reduce the amount of work to package software. Install software together transactionally.

An overview of a next-gen filesystem

Another talk I found interesting was the talk about bitrot, and filesystems like btrfs and ZFS. Best to read the presentation, and the article that was referenced.

Scaling GlusterFS at Facebook

A talk by Facebook is usually quite full, and I was interested in how they were using GlusterFS and if anyone has managed to successfully run a database over it yet (no). This was a talk given by Richard Wareing who’s been at Facebook for over 5 years:

• GB’s to many PBs, 100’s of millions of files. QPS (FOPs) is 10s of billions per day, namespace (volume), TBs to PBs and Bricks: 1000’s. Version 3.3.x is when they started and now they use 3.6.x (trail mainline closely)
• Use cases: archival, backing data store for large scale applications, anything that doesn’t fit into other DBs
• RAID6, controller is enterprise grade, storage is more consumer grade
• Primarily using XFS, and are starting to use btrfs (about 20% of the fleet run on it)
• closed source AntFarm, JD, and their IPv6 support (they removed IPv4 support). They have JSON Statistic dumps which they contributed upstream.
• a good mantra, pragmatism over correctness

Some expo hall chatter

There was plenty to followup post-SCALE14x with many having questions about MariaDB Server, or wanting to buy services around it from MariaDB Corporation. I learned for example that Rackspace maintains their own IUS repository of packages they think their customers will find important to use. The idea behind it is that its Inline with Upstream Stable. Naturally you will find MariaDB Server as well as packages for all the engines like CONNECT.

I also learned that Stacki uses MariaDB Server for provisioning, as was evidenced by their github issue.

Its incredibly rewarding to note that pretty much everyone knew what MariaDB Server was. Its been a long journey (six years!) but it sure feels sweet. Ilan and his team put on a great SCALE so I can’t wait to be back again next year.