The Melbourne MySQL User Group May Meetup – The Melbourne MySQL User Group – Meetup.com
We’re going to be going over cool stuff that happenned at the MySQL User Conference. Tales will be told, photos shown and questions answered.
A Googly MySQL Cluster Talk – Google Video
The talk I gave at Google is now up on Google Video for all to see. I don’t think I gave it as well as I did at the User Conference (largely because, I think, by this time I was really tired), but it still went well (I think).
Feedback is much appreciated – always looking for ways to improve my talks.
Oh, I’m also wearing an Augie March t-shirt.
Update: watching yourself give a presentation is a bit strange… but hopefully I can learn from watching my own talk.
Things I’ve learnt so far:
That’s all i wrote down while watching it. other input welcome
In this photo: Gallery :: MySQL Users Conference 2006 :: 3 it seems that Jeremy managed to capture me (in the background) explaining to the O’Reilly conference woman (I forget her name…. Arjen knows) that it really wasn’t too hard for them to get me lunch considering that inside the building the restaurant staff managed to get food for me (so why can’t they do it outside). I also expressed my dismay at my interaction with the staff around an (afternoon/morning… i forget now) interaction involving a request for an apple (see “How not to do customer service“).
This was after the catering staff took over an hour and a half to bring me a small plate of vegetables (mostly spinach – which I do like – but there’s only so much you can eat) and a salad (that never arrived).
I was also rather dismayed at the comment (from the conf woman) about how they “didn’t cater for vegans”. I then gave an explanation (that she seemed surprised by) that all vegetarians can eat food that is vegan – and a whole bunch of stuff they had out there could be vegan with next to no effort (e.g. not putting cheese in salad, vegetarian fried rice without egg). There’s also the fact that the sushi bar and the food serevd at the bar in the hotel (not 10ft from where we are) has managed to get me food easily and relatively promptly before.
Things did improve after this. Things like soy milk being available with morning/afternoon tea coffee (and being well used, I’m not the only one who drinks it). Also, the appearance of fruit. Not surprisingly, it mostly gone rather quickly (people like fruit).
Lesson for all conference organisers: have fruit. Everywhere. People like fruit. It’s good snack food that keeps your brain going (not your gut).
Oh, and I, of course, would have filled out the bit on the web form saying my dietry requirements. So it’s not as if they can claim ignorance.
Everything did work out eventually though. It just would have been nice to have lunch go smoother. Also, note to catering staff – kosher does not equal vegan. It really, really doesn’t.
MySQL AB :: MySQL: The World’s Most Popular Open Source Database
The cool thing is I wasn’t the one who noticed it. A holler goes out to Timmeah!
The Australian System Administrator’s Conference 2006
It’s interesting that the online registration doesn’t have an SSL certificate that matches. I now have to find a printer to produce dead tree to mail.
Considering that I don’t actually own a printer, this is getting interesting…
P.S. come to my tutorial on MySQL Cluster!
so he remembers
Denial Of Sushi Attack
http://www.dolphinics.com/ make this cool SCI socket hardware that can be used with MySQL Cluster (for example, like their example setup).
Their tech provides high performance (350MB/sec avail to the user) and low latency (worst case is like 2 or 3 micro seconds to send 512bytes to another node). So can pretty much kick the butt of gig-e.
We could probably do some really cool stuff with boosting performance (even further) when using SCI with some of the things I have in mind for multithreaded ndb kernel – basically changing some of the ways we do sending and receiving signals and improvements in shared memory stuff.
Big points from the presentation are:
It’s also good to note that 10 gigabit ethernet doesn’t really buy you anything in reducing latency. SCI gives you both improved bandwidth and latency.
People looking into wanting more performance in MySQL Cluster should have a good look at it.
It’s also used in fighter planes – which make cool loud jet noises.
(err… i didn’t mean to sound to rah rah. hopefully i’ve just sounded like i think the tech is shiny)
UPDATE: corrected milli to nano.
UPDATE mk2: corrected nano to micro. Oh how I wish I just typed correctly to begin with. At least I’ve had some rest now :)
Mike Hillyer’s Personal Web Space » Blog Archive » It’s Alive!!
Mike’s laptop went funny, but he had a backup of his presentation.
So, something about my backup strategy.
I have a policy that anything that I really care about is backed up. If it’s not backed up, I don’t care about it.
e.g. while I’d be sad if my mythtv box suddenly had a disk failure, I can always put in a blank disk and I don’t loose too much.
My email is fetched onto a server at home, and I use offlineimap to keep an up to date (nearly) copy on my laptop. I also, at least weekly, burn the entire thing to DVD (it still fits, when bzip2 compressed).
Also, for all that other stuff that is pretty important (/home), I do a xfsdump to external disk.
I also now (on a paranoid spending trip at Fry’s) have a small portable drive that is roughly twice the size of my /home partition. The idea is that on the road I can regularly do an xfsdump to this – in fact, two complete dumps (and one or two incrementals on it).
Call me paranoid, but I like my data.
I also make sure I burn photos to DVD, but that’s more periodic as there’s a lot of them now.
“there’s nothing here i can eat for morning tea, could I please get an apple?”
“no”.
fuck.
So, we had a really good Cluster BOF last night. Started at 8:30 and at 11pm everybody was tired enough to go to bed :)
Healthy mix of people with deployed clusters, prototype clusters and even some who have looked at MySQL Cluster in the past, decided it wasn’t for them at that point in time, but are still interested enough to show up to the BOF.
It was really freeform (as in I got up and said “there is no agenda for this – what do we want to talk about?”).
We got some really valuable feedback about what people like, dislike and even did hands-up polls of “what do you want us to do first?”. Also got some good suggestions on what to tweak (small fixes) to make people’s lives a lot easier.
The room was pretty well populated as well. my guess was half full (which means nothing until you see the size of the rooms. i’ll try and get a photo at some point).
The consensus at the end seemed to be that people found the BOF valuable as well.
I’d love to hear further feedback. Be brutally honest too.
I can relax now, My talk is done and I’ve been talkinq to people about more specific things. Several have congratulated me on it.
Looking forward to the BOF, although sleep would be nice.oh how I’m going to sleep on the plane
It should be also noted that showing up can win you stuff. Mikal did a survey thing ore something and his name has been flashing up on the screen saying he’s won stuff. Don’t know if he knows yet :)
“Not good to hear Monty arguing with Brian…”
MySQL Users Conference 2006 – MySQL Cluster: New Features and Enhancements
If you are coming to my talk, make sure you know a bit about cluster beforehand. Being at Johan’s talk today was a good idea.
Or reading the manual chapter.
Otherwise you may end up being quite lost for a lot of the talk. Mine isn’t an intro to cluster one.
that is not beer
.techtalk