Last week I summarized the Percona Live 2012 Conference for you. I went over some of the different topics that were covered during the talks. Today I’m going to briefly discuss the 2 tutorials that I personally felt were most beneficial to me and hopefully they will be to you too! Both talks were designed for Database Administrators (DBA) but could be easily appreciated by application developers and Systems Administrators as well. Ronald Bradford (Effective MySQL) was the speaker at both talks made them feel like a 2 part series. I found the information in “Idiosyncrasies of MYSQL That Bite” to build
on the first talk, “Explaining the EXPLAIN”.
Explaining the EXPLAIN was the first talk of the two. Ronald Bradford used this presentation to discuss how the MySQL Query Optimizer develops a Query Execution Plan (QEP). He pointed out that EXPLAIN will only work on SELECT statements. This means you may need to re-write a query into a SELECT using WHERE. It’s interesting to note that the QEP is generated every time MySQL actually processes a query. There is no way to guarantee that a query is run in the same fashion as the QEP provided using EXPLAIN but chances are good. I learned that based on how your query is formed and how your tables are built, there are times where MySQL might just completely re-write your query to get the results you are looking for, and the resulting queries could be very expensive.
The second talk was called Idiosyncrasies of MySQL That Bite, also by Ronald Bradford. A lot of what he talked about here was actually familiar to me, but there were some extremely valuable insights that came from his time working with databases in general. For instance, I knew that the default date for a DATETIME column was all zeros, but I never considered how badly this could affect critical data where MySQL has replaced malformed dates with the default. I also never thought about how a misspelled “`ENGINE=InoDB`” or charset mismatch could completely change the way perfectly normal queries could run. Luckily, MySQL has the SQL_MODE variable which can be used to modify most of this kind of behavior.
Both talks were valuable to me, partly because in each one, the speaker showed us some very interesting quirks to look out for in MySQL, and what to do when you see them, or how to even prevent them all together. He did it in a way that was fun, and easy to understand. I hope you were able to take away some tips as well.
We just got back from the Percona Live event in Santa Clara, CA and wanted to share our experience with our readers. The event, which was organized by Percona and sponsored by some great companies, was filled with amazing talks from some of the top minds in MySQL.
Day 1 was filled with tutorials on many different topics related to administering database servers using MySQL ranging from security to
troubleshooting and performance tuning. There were so many to choose from, and we found the biggest problem was choosing which talks to attend.
Peter Zaitsev (Percona CEO) had a tutorial on InnoDB and XtraDB specific performance optimizations while Sheeri Cabral (Mozilla) went over some ways to secure the database and verify security using the same tools that black hats would use. After lunch, Rene Cannao (PalominoDB) discussed measuring performance with proper benchmarking and profiling, and showed specific cases where using the tools he introduced, led to a quick resolution of otherwise difficult to diagnose problems. Baron Schwartz (Percona) also discussed ways to more effectively manage MySQL using the Percona Toolkit while Florian Haas (hastexo) discussed High Availability solutions with Yves Trudeau (Percona).
Read the full post »
At the 2011 HIMSS show in Orlando, I spent the first day getting the feel for the show and into a rhythm with our team at INetU’s booth. Finally on the second day I was able to attend a session. The session I chose to attend was: Securing Health Information on the Cloud.
The speaker, Feisal Nanji (Executive Director for Techuman), did a great job of outlining cloud terminology basics for the purpose of framing his discussion. While a highly technical audience may have found much of it to be a review, there were a lot of useful takeaways to help the less technically-minded attendees unravel the data security confusion that’s compounded by the “fuzzy” nature of cloud discussions.
In my opinion, this is where a lot of other thought leaders “miss”: they spew facts and statistics, but often don’t guide the audience to put their own problems in the correct context so they learn to ask the right questions.
Read the full post »
On January 19th 2011 INetU launched our first event in The INetU IT Expert Series, the 2011 Secure Web Hosting and IT Infrastructure Summit. We held the Secure Web Hosting and IT Infrastructure Summit in Kansas City, MO at the office of Polsinelli Shughart PC. For those who did not attend I want to give a little recap on how the show went and what our attendees learned.
Our show speakers included: Pat Shore and Mike Saxton from IntelliThink, Steve Goldsby from Integrated Computer Solutions, Scott Walters from iNetU Managed Hosting, Tim Steffens from Polsinelli Shughart PC and Scott Kice from the FBI Cyber Crimes Task Force.
The Secure Web Hosting and IT Infrastructure Summit also involved companies who brought their own repertoire of attendees to the show. Each vendor had a table and provided information about their company to the SWHITI Summit attendees. Our vendors included: Marathon Solutions, Knighton Business Solutions, Greentree Technology Partners, and Accelerent.
Despite the snow in Kansas City (the day of the show), I was impressed with our exceptional turnout. Everyone who attended the Secure Web Hosting and IT Infrastructure Summit gained new information on secure hosting. Here’s what some of the attendees learned:
- “Don’t use stray USB devices
”
- “There is much to be concerned about IT Security; companies really have to rely on the expertise of their outsourced partners. This requires building trust, rather than comparing bids.”
- “Received a great summary on data breach laws.”
- “I learned a lot about the TP&M framework that was very helpful.”
- “Top issues that make IT business difficult to manage.”
- “The business part of IT is just as important as the technical aspect. I really have a lot to improve on that side.”
- “To have lawyers contract the external auditors in case of a data breach.”
INetU’s 2011 Secure Web Hosting and IT Infrastructure Summit set a great precedent for our future INetU Education Series events. We are planning another INetU Education Series event in June 2011, stay tuned for more information!
Thank you to all of the participating companies, speakers, and everyone else who helped make the Secure Web Hosting & IT Infrastructure Summit a success!
INetU Managed Hosting, a Platinum Sponsor for the Central PA Open Source Conference, will be attending the CPOSC conference tomorrow October 16th in Harrisburg, PA!
The conference will be held at Harrisburg University, in downtown Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. INetU will have a table at the conference, where John Forester will be representing the INetU Solutions Consultant team. Stop by to pick up some information on our services or some INetU goodies! John will be there to help you with any questions you have on INetU Managed Hosting’s offerings.
Even more exciting than that, our very own Scott Walters (Director of Client Services) and Chris Grello (Senior Systems Engineer) will be speaking at the Central PA Open Source Conference!
Scott will be speaking on his topic ‘Compliance, what’s the hubbub bub?’. Scott will talk about the different compliance regulations today SAS70, PCI, HIPAA, etc. He will answer questions and also cover some lessons learned during implementation and on-going support of environments that need to be compliant.
Chris will present ‘MySQL backup and recovery… are you ready?’ Chris’ presentation will discuss the methods to ensure that backups are not only being performed but are succeeding. So they can be relied upon when your data needs to be recovered.
For more information on CPOSC visit here, we hope to see you all at the Central PA Open Source (CPOSC) Conference tomorrow!
