Weekly Musings – May 20, 2022

The Linux Foundation came across my reading path two separate times this week. As I continue to re-establish my larger footprint solely in the open-source ecosystem Setting an Open Source Strategy is a detailed report for any business to identify the potential return on investment (ROI) of participating in the open-source ecosystem. Every company uses open source. Even if you consume open source in your organization and do not plan to contribute to open source it is a good read to determine what is the inflection point where you (or your employees) may want to invest.

This week I spent some more time looking at the various Open Source Foundations after reading White House joins OpenSSF and the Linux Foundation in securing open-source software. The Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) is a project of the The Linux Foundation. OpenSSF has created the “The Open Source Software Security Mobilization Plan”. This plan lists 10 streams of investment for open source security and I feel it’s important to reiterate these.

  • Security Education – Deliver baseline secure software development education and certification to all.
  • Risk Assessment – Establish a public, vendor-neutral, objective, metrics-based risk assessment dashboard for the top 10,000 (or more) OSS components.
  • Digital Signatures – Accelerate the adoption of digital signatures on software releases.
  • Memory Safety – Eliminate root causes of many vulnerabilities through replacement of non-memory-safe languages.
  • Incident Response – Establish an OpenSSF Incident Response Team of security experts to assist open source projects accelerate their responses to newly discovered vulnerabilities.
  • Better Scanning – Accelerate discovery of new vulnerabilities by maintainers and experts through advanced security tools and expert guidance.
  • Code Audits – Conduct third-party code reviews (and any necessary remediation work) of up to 200 of the most-critical OSS components once per year.
  • Data Sharing – Coordinate industry-wide data sharing to improve the research that helps determine the most critical OSS components.
  • SBOMs Everywhere – Improve SBOM tooling and training to drive adoption.
  • Improved Software Supply Chains – Enhance the 10 most critical OSS build systems, package managers, and distribution systems with better supply chain security tools and best practices.

While I have not read this, CNCF released the Cloud Native Security Whitepaper v2 this week.

In open source conference land we saw in-person events including Percona Live 2022 and KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2022. Which I was there!

In unrelated tech news, I have cut the cord following ongoing poor customer service with a legacy provider. Welcome to YouTube TV. I am automatically impressed with more features and 1/3 of the price.
Also, Derek Muller has a new video out. Check out my favorite YouTube channel Veritasium.

I’ll leave this blog with a few images reflecting the week.

handcalcs
Azure Cloud Infographic
For Application Security in your Pipelines
Shark Tracking

Percona Live Conference Recommendations

Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo, April 22-25, 2013

While many attendees are repeat offenders, if 2013 is your first MySQL conference and you are relatively new with MySQL (say < 2 years experience), it can be daunting to determine which of the 8 or more concurrent sessions you should attend during the conference.

Here are my top recommendations that give you a good grounding in the various conference topics and a wealth of experience from known MySQL authorities, on important topics.

  1. A backup today saves you tomorrow by Ben Mildred at Pythian. Losing your data is a terrible experience. Learn what is needed to keep your data safe and you system highly available.
  2. Survey of Percona Toolkit: Command-Line tools for MySQL by Daniel Nichter at Percona. There are a wealth of additional MySQL tools that any resource should be familiar with. These are some of the most popular.
  3. Script It. Make Professional DBA tools out of nothing by Giuseppe Maxia at Continuent. I seasoned expert in the MySQL field, his expertise is invaluable to learn how to use MySQL effeciently. Giuseppe is also the creator of MySQL Sandbox, a huge productivity tool for developers.
  4. Practices for reducing MySQL database size by Yoshinori Matsunobu at Facebook. This is a consulting technique I use for great advantage with clients to improve performance. Yoshinori is also one of the most popular technical speakers at events.
  5. MHA: Getting started and moving past the quirks by Colin Charles at Monty Program. Creating a HA environment is essential for any successful application. MHA is one open source approach that should be considered.
  6. Managing data and data archiving using MySQL 5.6 new features of portable tablespace and exchange partition by Marco tusa at Pythian. If there was one footnote feature in MySQL 5.6 that has a huge benefit, this is the feature. As data continues to grow rapidly in size, archiving is more important.

This year’s conference talks are organized by topic and skill level. This can also help you find talks specific to your needs. Topics include the following:

  • Developing Applications
  • Tools
  • Best Practices for Businesses
  • Database Administration
  • Utilizing Hardware
  • Replication and High Availability Strategies
  • Treads in Architecture and Design
  • New Features

2013 is sure to be a great event, with a lineup of many MySQL product features for the MySQL ecosystem.

I will be speaking at Percona Live New York

Percona Live New York City, October 1 - 2, 2012
Percona is back for a second New York Percona Live Conference. As the resident New York MySQL Expert, I will again be presenting. My session will be on MySQL Backup and Recovery Essentials.

You can only present so much in one hour, and this presentation just touches on the highlights of what is possible. More detailed information about the right backup and recovery strategy and associated tools is available in my current book Effective MySQL: Backup and Recovery.

An excellent conference (5 out of 5 stars)

I wanted to extend thanks as others have also about the excellent annual MySQL Conference, now a Percona Live event. This was easily the best run, attended and energetic event in at least the past 3 years. With over a 1000 attendees a well stocked exhibitors hall (and good involvement in the hall), and good talks; there was just a great community vibe. To Terry, Kortney and all Percona staff involved, well done. The event ran on time, I personally did not see or hear of any issues. The only complaint was from many that wanted to attend multiple talks at the same time, another indication of the quality of speakers for the event.

Thank you to those that attended my two sessions on Explaining the MySQL Explain and MySQL Idiosyncrasies that BITE. Many people thanked me after presentations, along also with people coming up to me to say they appreciated the first book of the Effective MySQL Series. My desires to speak and write are only for the benefit of the MySQL community to hopefully learn and appreciate how to best use MySQL.

It was of course great to see many MySQL alumni, and old friends I have seen since meeting at my first MySQL conference in 2006.

MySQL now has two user conferences (*)

PC World has written a post with this title(*) about the upcoming MySQL Connect conference and references the Percona Live conference and an official Percona comment. As this is not syndicated in Planet MySQL I encourage you to read the full article.

This is the MySQL conference to get technical presentations by the many great Oracle/MySQL technical staff who will not be in attendance at Percona Live. There will also be a strong community presence in speaking at Oracle Connect in September. While Oracle was organizing a dedicated MySQL event in April for the community with all vendors including Percona to replace the conference dropped by long term partner O’Reilly (kudos for many years of great events), Percona decided to go at it without including Oracle, the owners and developers of MySQL. The statement quoted in the PC World article regarding “lack of momentum around the [annual community] event” is clearly inaccurate and not a true representation of actual events.

It is difficult to keep up with all the community events Oracle is now running including multiple OTN MySQL Developer days per month across the US and Europe. I will be speaking at the upcoming OTN NY event in April, the Rocky Mountain Training Day in May, and hopefully the MySQL Innovation day in June. Get the full list at Upcoming MySQL Events.

Indeed MySQL content and presentations have also been represented at Oracle Open World for a number of years. 2011 was a very large turnout and many MySQL presentations. As a senior consultant for MySQL Inc I manned a MySQL booth at OOW exhibition hall back in 2007, prior to both Sun and Oracle acquisitions.

Extra: Using Index

Many people consider this information in the MySQL Query Execution Plan (QEP) to indicate that the referenced table is using an index. It actually means that ONLY the index is used. This can for larger and more frequent queries provide a significant boost.

In a recent example, adding an index dropped a query from 190ms to 6ms. However adding a better index dropped that 6ms query to 1.2ms. When executed 100s/1000s of times per second these millisecond improvements can have a huge benefit in greater scalability. While people often tune slow running queries, in a well tuned system shaving milliseconds of queries, in this example making 6ms query 80% better is a far greater improvement.

You can get a detailed explanation of how to identify, create and verify covering indexes from my Percona Live presentation Improving performance with better indexes where I also include another great 10 table join example, reducing a query running 20,000+ times per second from 175ms to 10ms.