Category: Conferences

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Friendlist Graph Module for Drupal

At DrupalSouth 2010 (Wellington) after LCA2010, Peter and I implemented a Drupal module as a practical example of how the OQGRAPH engine can be used to enable social networking trickery in any website. The friendlist_graph module (available from GitHub) extends friendlist, which implements basic functionality of friends (2-way) and fans (1-way) for Drupal users.

The friendlist_graph module transposes the friendlist data using an OQGRAPH table, allowing you to query it in new and interesting ways. By adding some extra Drupal Views, it allows you to play Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon with your Drupal users or find out how two arbitrary users are connected. It can find a path of arbitrary length near-instantly. Previously, you’d just avoid doing any such thing as it’s somewhere between impossible/limited/slow/painful in a regular relational schema.

Now think beyond: retrieve/share connections using Open Social, FOAF, Twitter/Identi.ca, logins with OpenID, and you “instantly” get a very functional social networking enabled site that does not rely on localised critical mass!

We tested with about a million users in Drupal (and approx 3.5 million random connections), which worked fine – the later demo at the DrupalSouth stuffed up because I hadn’t given the demo VM sufficient memory.

Naturally, you could do the same in Joomla! or another CMS or any site for that matter, we just happened to be at DrupalSouth so a Drupal module was the obvious choice. Take a peek at the code, it’s pretty trivial. Just make sure you run a version of MySQL that has the OQGRAPH engine, for instance 5.0.87-d10 (Sail edition!) from OurDelta.

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OQGRAPH at OpenSQL Camp 2009, Portland

Antony is travelling up to Portland for this great event that’s about to start Fri evening and going over the weekend. He’ll be showing other devs and people more about the OQGRAPH engine, and gathering useful feedback.

Open Query is, together with many others (I see Giuseppe, Facebook, Gear6, Google, Infobright, Jeremy Cole, PrimeBase Technologies, Percona, Monty Program, and lots more), sponsoring the event so that it’s accessible for everybody – reducing the key factor to getting there rather than having to worry about high conf fees.

Having acquired the world’s biggest jetlag flying to Charlottesville VA for last year’s OpenSQL Camp, I can confirm from personal experience that it’s a great event. While I can’t be there this time, I’m looking forward to hearing all about it!

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Mmm, what an interesting week

I have been very busy here in Malaysia this week. On thursday, I was asked to do a MySQL University session on MMM. The preparation was very stressful. There was no good wifi to be found until literally a few hours before the session (Big thank you to Gurdip at APIIT for providing a space and exceptional help!). On top of that, dimdim, the software used by MySQL for their sessions doesn’t seem to want to work on Linux (particularly the speaker part). I ended up using a laptop borrowed from APIIT with Vista and IE. Feels kind of counter-intuitive for a company in the FOSS business.

The session went very well and here is the resulting recording of the MMM talk on the mysqlforge page.

But that wasn’t the end of the MMM-promotion week: I happened to be allowed to present at the foss.my conference in Kuala Lumpur pretty last minute. At first I was going to do an updated version of the talk I gave at Froscon in August, but I was asked to do a tutorial session of 3 hours. I had never done anything like that, but I am always up for a challenge 🙂

Again, preparation was a bit stressful. I didn’t know how many people to expect and it wasn’t clear if I would achieve getting running MMM clusters up in 3 hours. Well, I was underestimating my own capabilities apparently. Almost 100 people showed up, most of them without a laptop. I was surprised at that and explained them that it was probably not going to be so interesting for them. Again, I was wrong. While the laptop-owners prepared their laptops, I used my time to explain to everyone what MMM is, and how it works. Then we set up the laptops, solving all the problems we met on the beamer that we had a user connected to.

In the end we managed to set up 2 clusters within exactly 3 hours. Only 6 (almost 7) ‘servers’ participated in that end-result, for various reasons the rest was not possible. Still, it was a very good result and the attendees were visibly very happy.

If you hadn’t noticed yet, I’m a big fanboy for MMM and thinks this project needs/deserves a lot more visibility. It really solves a bunch of problems many MySQL admins struggle with, while providing a simple, cheap HA solution. This week has been very good for the promotion of MMM.

Along the way I also discovered that I really love doing this workshop and I hope to do many more like this. On that note: if you know of any conferences or meetings in the Asia Pacific area in the upcoming months, let me know and I’ll try to be there with either a presentation or a workshop!

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OpenSQL Camp Portland OR, 14-15 Nov 2009

OpenSQL Camp Portland 2009 is coming up on the 14th and 15th of November. Eric Day (of the Drizzle project) is the lead organiser this time around.

I went to the first edition in Charlottesville VA last year which was organised by Baron Schwartz (Percona). It was a great event, like other unconferences but with specific focus on database technologies. Monty (MySQL), Brian (Drizzle), Richard (SQLite), Jim (Interbase/Firebird/Falcon), Bruce (PostgreSQL) were all these, as were various storage engine builders. Very interesting, and lots of informal fun. If you’re anywhere near, do go!

Even though noone from our gang is able to make it to this one, Open Query is sponsoring this event – for all the above reasons. It rocks and deserves every support.

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Looking for MySQL-ish things around Thailand/SE Asia

I recently relocated to Khon Kaen, Thailand for 3 months. Since I can do my Open Query work from anywhere (as long as there is a decent internet connection with not too much latency) that is entirely no problem. It is a nice city, far from the business/busyness of Bangkok. Almost noone speaks english here, which makes even the simplest task an adventure (imagine miming an umbrella in front of 10 giggling store employees)

Now that I have gotten settled in Khon Kaen, I am looking for fun work-related things to do around here: conferences, user groups, interesting projects etc. Anything goes really, even if it is not so much work-related. I also have free time on my hands 🙂

I am quite likely going to do a tutorial on MMM at FOSS.my in Kuala Lumpur. It’s still waiting on a few things since I announced my availability super-late, but I have good hope. I am turning to our readers to ask for suggestions of places/people that I can visit while here. Suggestions anyone?

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Storage Miniconf Deadline Extended!

The linux.conf.au organisers have given all miniconfs an additional few weeks to spruik for more proposal submissions, huzzah!

So if you didn’t submit a proposal because you weren’t sure whether you’d be able to attend LCA2010, you now have until October 23 to convince your boss to send you and get your proposal in.

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Storage miniconf at linux.conf.au 2010

Since you were going to linux.conf.au 2010 in Wellington, NZ anyway in January of next year, you should submit a proposal to speak at the data storage and retrieval miniconf.

If you have something to say about storage hardware, file systems, raid, lvm, databases or anything else linux or open source and storage related, please submit early and submit often!

The call for proposals is open until September 28.

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FrOSCon 2009: 1 down, 1 to go

So, I’m in my hotel room and I got some sleep. Now, it is 2:15 am and Icouldn’t sleep for some reason. PRobably has something to do with me being narcoleptic, as weird as it sounds 🙂 Since I can’t sleep for a bit anyway, I figured writing a blog summarising the first day of FrOSCon would be a good idea.

Well, in one word: GREAT! In a few more: The first day was a big success. I started it out with a shift at the registration desk (I’m volunteering for FrOSCon as well). Since it was very early, most people that came in were actually exhibitors and speakers, and they all had to be at the VIP desk. At first, the door wouldn’t open. Later it turned out that the sensors thought we were to close to it. Claustrophobic doors are interesting.

Then, there was breakfast for the people with VIP access. Basically that was anyone who was not just a visitor. I helped out for a bit and then went back to my hotel room to catch up on some sleep and practice my talk a bit. The practice run was done in a staggering 57 minutes, which was exactly enough since I had 1 hour to finish. I went back to the conference and saw some talks. I saw the tail-end of Sheeri’s talk on ‘a better mysqltuner’ and then the start of Jan Kneschke’s talk on MySQL proxy. It was interesting, but my nerves made me exit that prematurely so I could be sure to be in time for my own talk.

When I walked into the conference room I was giving my talk in a half hour in advance, it was already empty because the previous talk was finished early. This gave me a decent amount of time to finish setting up.

I decided to use the wiimote that the CentOS guys were offering as a presentation remote. That turned out to be a very good decision, as it gives you something to hold in your hands so you hve soemthing to do with them. It also gives you force feedback and led information on how much time you have used for your talkso far. Pretty awesome!

The talk itself went pretty well, and people asked good questions afterwards. One guy came up to me an I thought he was asking me a question, only have hearing him sya he wrote this stuff. It took me a while to realise that it was Pascal Hoffman, the guy that wrote all of MMM 2. I hung out with him and my friend Nicolas from Rotterdam at the social event all night, speaking about many things related to MMM.

That is actually what these conferences are so great for: the human interaction aspect. You get to meet the humans behind an irc-name or blog, and talk to them directly, (almost) always a pleasant experience.

Before the social event I went to the PBXT talk in the OpenSQLCamp room, but i was too tired to focus on it with the attention it deserved. Kind of ashame, because i think PBXT is an interesting project.

Looking forward to tomorrow, in particular to the shootout in the OpenSQLCamp room between experts from various open source databases. I guess I should go back to sleep now, so I am full of energy tomorrow. Walter signing off!

PS. I’ll put the slides to my talk online as soon as possible.

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Getting ready for FrOScon 2009

I arrived yesterday in St. Augustin, near Bonn in Germany. After a good day of hitchhiking (weather is beautiful here) I stayed with my Pakistani Couchsurfing host and we had an extremely interesting evening talking about the gigantic cultural differences between western civilization and Pakistani civilization. It beats staying in a hotel by about a million points 🙂

This morning I headed to the FrOScon HQ at the fachhochschule to help out with whatever was needed. Turns out that was a bit premature (misunderstanding on my part), so I have had some time to catch up on mail and give some more attention to my talk on Saturday. I’ll be helping out throughout the and the whole day tomorrow with things though.

I’ll be talking about MySQL MMM, a project that I have invested quite a bit of time in getting to know. My talk will outline what MMM is, what it’s not and an example of our setup at Open Query. It’s a full hour long, so it should be very interesting to be able to go into that much detail.

If you are near St. Augustin, make sure to come by for Froscon, as it’s schedule has some very interesting talks and you’ll also have a good chance to meet fellow MySQL-geeks in the OpenSQLCamp dev-room.

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Joomla Day Brisbane

After the morning and afternoon tutorials today by Andrew Eddie (Joomla dev lead), tomorrow is Joomla Day – Brisbane Joomla Users Group where I’ll be doing talk as well.

I’ve already noticed that Joomla users are a slightly different crowd. Joomla is a pretty powerful CMS with many modules/extensions, just like Drupal which runs the Open Query web site. I’m not sure the two even compete directly although there might be some overlap. It occurred to me that Joomla might be what I would call an “enabling technology” on the web, just like PHP and MySQL have been since 1995. It has a very easy entry, which of course is both good as well as bad. Again that’s quite similar to the M and the P…. love it or hate it.

I’m kinda agnostic on the subject of CMSses, there’s quite a few out there and I think that most of the main ones have a valid place or niche in the market where they thrive. That makes sense. They shouldn’t each aim to be everything for everybody…. plugin architectures can somewhat guard against that, but there’s more to it than that of course.

Anyway, I think it’s interesting to observe these things, and how different applications have a (slightly) different userbase with different perspectives and objectives.

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