Good afternoon Oscon attendees - in particular attendees of my High Availability in MySQL tutorial!

Attached you can find a spreadsheet (both LibreOffice, Excel) that we will use at the end of the tutorial. You can also download the slides, in case you wish to browse them at your own pace.

Below are the slides from my last talk at this Percona Live Worldwide MySQL Conference. The idea for this talk was proposed by my co-presenter Massimo Brignoli and goes back to a debate on this topic that went through the MySQL blogosphere during last Autumn - which in itself was sparked by an outstanding retrospective published about a MySQL failure at Github.

As a few LinkedIn friends already noticed, I have started working together with the Galera team at Codership. It is a part time "advisor" position and I still continue my full time work at Nokia, supporting various databases behind the new HERE.com portal.

We get a lot of requests for more blogs and better documentation to explain in-depth how Galera work. That's an area I will work on a lot. The first "deliverable" is out today: the first Galera white paper.

Attached are the slides for my MySQL Connect talk Evaluating MySQL High-availability alternatives, which I will present today at 14:30 at the MySQL Connect conference.

A bit unusually I'm posting the material ahead of the talk. The point of the talk is about evaluating each alternative from your own perspective. With that in mind, if you're at the talk with your own laptop, feel free to browse the slides at your own pace from here.

In the Matrix movie there is a scene where the heroes visit a spiritual councelor, and amongst the people in her waiting room they see a little boy, dressed like a buddhist monk, who can bend a spoon just by looking at it. When they ask him what he does to bend the spoon, the boy's answer is: "There is no spoon". And if you watch the movie to the end, you will see that he is right. (In that spirit, if this post is too long to read for you, just skip to the last paragraph for the answer.)

The title for this blog post is of course inspired by Baron's "Is automated failover the root of all evil?", which is a commentary on GitHub's detailed explanation of their recent Pacemaker-induced downtime. Baron makes a good question, but the answer is deeper than suggested by the question. The problem is not the automation, the problem is the failover.

My three previous blog posts I already wrote from Froscon. In this post I still want to go back and mention some people I met and discussions I had.

The MySQL side

There were of course many MySQL people, with both SkySQL and Oracle sponsoring. It was great to meet Carsten from Oracle, who has joined the MySQL Sales Engineer team in Europe (he moved from an OpenOffice position). That's my former team, so it was great to see a new face!

Going there the person I was most looking forward to meet was Hana Hütter, formerly a MySQL account manager for Central Europe, and now doing the same at SkySQL. My first ever MySQL sales gig was with Hana, and Ralf Gebhart who is also now with SkySQL but was not at Froscon. While Ralf was there only that first time to teach me how to be a Sales Engineer, with Hana we then continued to sell MySQL into telecom companies in many European cities. I had not met Hana since I left Sun. It was really great to see again. We had lunch, I told about my experiments with Galera and she told about her customers being interested in it too. It was great to get in touch with the "frontlines" again!

She also told me a great story about MySQL adoption in Europe...

People often assume the reason I talk at conferences is because I like to teach them about Galera, MySQL and other cool, open source things. That's of course true to some extent. But for me personally, another reason is even more important: It happens almost always that the audience teaches me something. Thus the process of public speaking has increasingly become my way to learn new insights. Low level details that aren't easy to learn by just RTFM.

My talk for MySQL Connect has been accepted. This is the MySQL specific 2 day conference just before the big Oracle OpenWorld and JavaOne. It is kind of a new conference by Oracle. They've had something called MySQL Sunday at this spot before, but this year it is a bit bigger and with a bigger spin on it. I'm glad it is on a weekend because otherwise I wouldn't be able to attend.

I will give the popular Evaluating MySQL High Availability Alternatives talk that I have been refining in two Percona Live conferences already. With MySQL 5.6 in the oven now, there's something new again to talk about.