Presenting "Real-Life Use Cases From Data Administration Hell" at LAMySQL

If you're in the Los Angeles area on Feb 15, come hear my talk at LAMySQL inspired by learnings from real-life experiences. In addition to hearing a very unique and interesting talk, you can win an AppleTV thanks to awesome folks at @NoodleYard.

Real-Life Use Cases From Data Administration Hell

Data is the most valuable asset of an organization because it's irreplaceable.

Yet, we hear about f**k ups related to data administration every day by startups and organizations of all sizes. Sometimes it's no one's fault. Sometimes it's the fault of a drunk friend who shouldn't have been [wherever he was] at the first place.

Yet, at other times, the disaster could have been prevented. Sometimes, these f**k ups are caused by bad design. Sometimes, it's a bad query that made it into the production branch. Sometimes, it's a human error that ruins the day.

Ever had a bad query slip through QA? Or a configuration option that you thought would help the situation? Sometimes, the resulting disaster could have been prevented if those operating had simply followed the rules. Sometimes it's the lack of presence of rules that leads to a disaster. Sometimes, the "acts of prevention" worsen the impact of the disaster. Sometimes it's over confidence of those administering data.

Imagine deletion of a wrong record or from a wrong server. Or not treating the only SAN as a SPOF. Sometimes, the f**k up has been happening for years, yet no one realized or fixed it.

Sometimes, the f**k up is created intentionally. By focusing on things other than operational and capacity requirements. Sometimes, a small error threatens the very existence of a company.

At least once of a $100M company.

These f**k ups happen everywhere. At organizations of all sizes.

In this talk, Frank Mashraqi will explore real-life inspired, breath-taking (anonymized) use cases that created data administration hell for an organization. He will also explore how, if at all, these f**k ups could have been avoided.

This session presents an opportunity to learn from the real-life costly data administration mistakes of others and what strategies can help you with not getting caught off guard.

Bio

With more than a decade of scalability, disaster recovery and engineering management experience under his belt, Frank specializes in building and scaling NoSQL and SQL based platforms for graph processing and big data deployments using low concurrencies.

He is an expert in audience acquisition through organic search engine optimization and audience monetization through cutting edge technologies as re-targeting, social targeting and influencer targeting.

His past experience includes co-founding a graph processing company that applies advanced sociological theories to online advertising, scaling Fotolog to help it become the 13th most visited site on the Internet, and advising companies like Betaworks, Bitly, TwitterFeed, Chartbeat and ShermansTravel.

He holds a BBA in Accounting and a BS in Computer Information Systems.

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PS: Many thanks to JoeDevon for inviting me to speak

PS: I'll be driving from the Bay Area so if anyone is interested in riding with me from SF to LA and back, let me know :)

Memcached Webinar - 560+ registrants

A big thank you to all those who attended the memcached webinar today on which I was a panelist. I was told that there were more than 560 registrants.

The feedback I received directly and indirectly shows that there is a lot of interest about memcached. In the future, I hope to work again with MySQL/Sun on more memcached related webinars.

If you attended the webinar and have some suggestions, comments or questions, please contact me at fmashraqi at yahoo dot com or post a comment on this blog.

Special thanks to Jimmy Guerrero, Monty Taylor, Rich Taylor, Edwin DeSouza and Alex Roedling for their hard work in arranging the webinar. Also thanks to Brian Aker, Matt Ingenthron and Trond Norbye for their assistance at various phases.

In case you missed the webinar:

• webinar recording: Designing and Implementing Scalable Applications with Memcached and MySQL ( you'll need Webex player to view the recording )
• memcached webinar slides

Scaling MySQL with Solaris 10: Webinar

On Wednesday, October 24, at 2 PM EST I will be presenting an Information Week webinar about scaling MySQL on Solaris 10. The webinar is free to attend and sponsored by Sun. The webinar will be followed by a Live QA session.
Register for the webinar

_DESCRIPTION
Fotolog is the world's largest photo blogging social network, boasting more than 700,000 new photos per day and more than 3 billion page views a month. More than 11 million fotologgers communicate and connect through their photos on Fotolog. With the help of Solaris 10 and MySQL Enterprise, Fotolog has scaled to become a top 20 destination on the Internet according to Alexa.

In this TechWebcast, Sun Microsystem's partner Fotolog shows creative ways used to scale their Web 2.0 architecture and MySQL Enterprise with Solaris 10 advanced features. Unlike typical scalability presentations which focus on the entire stack, Fotolog will emphasize on the role that understanding one's application, operating system and storage engine can play in addressing scalability challenges.

Web 2.0 applications world-wide rely on Sun to deliver the right combination of product innovation and capability, coupled with market leading partner solutions like Fotolog and MySQL.

Representatives from both Sun and MySQL will be present to take your questions. Hope to see you there!

Update: The recording (with audio) of this webinar is now available on Information Week website. Please note that registration is still required. After registration you should be able to view the recording.

Technocation presents MySQL conference videos and presentations

Sheeri, a good friend of mine has been working very hard to record, process and then publish hours and hours of MySQL conference videos. She has published the recordings on Technocation.

One request that I wanted to make to everyone is that if you download videos or presentations from Technocation, please consider giving a little back in form of a donation. All that goes in Technocation is ultimately for the benefit of the community. And remember, every little bit counts.

MySQL conference ending thoughts and presentation files

Man, I can't believe it's been over a week since I returned from the very great and exciting MySQL conference 2007. I got to meet all my old and new friends. Big Kudos to Jay Pipes and all MySQL'ers who helped make this event possible.

To me, this year's conference was the best ever. Partly because I made the very wise decision of staying at Hyatt so I won't miss a lot. At conferences like these the more you mingle with people, the more you get out of it. I had some amazing conversations with Mark Atwood, Brian Aker, Jay Pipes (I will never forget :)), Jeremy Cole, Eric Bergen, Pascal (Yahoo! France), Beat Vontobel, Markus Popp, Boel (MySQL HR), Christine Fortier, Marc Simony, Govi (Amazon), the "R"s of MySQL (Ronald and Ronald), Sheeri Kritzer, Carsten (certification), Ken Jacobs (Oracle), Kaj Arno, Dean (MySQL Support head), Domas, Kerry Ancheta (MySQL sales guru :)), Baron, Paul Tuckfield, Don MacAskill, Tobias, Peter Zaitsev, Chip Turner, Mark Callaghan and many more cool people. Thank you, everyone.

The sad part is that there wasn't enough time for me to hang out with people as much as I wanted. Oh well, MySQL Camp II is just around the corner in NYC.

I would also never forget the night I went to Denny's and had a Jalapeno burger with Michelle (wife), Jeremy, Adrienne (Mrs. Cole), Liam, Eric, Ronald, Domas and Pascal. It was so much fun.

At the conference, I also got a chance to be a part of MySQL Certification Technical Advisory Board (thanks to Carsten and Roland for having me). There were some excellent ideas and important issues discussed there. Everyone, including Mike Kruckenberg, Collins Charles and Sheeri contributed some excellent suggestions.

The presentation files for my sessions are now available at http://www.mysqlconf.com. Thank you to all those who written me repeatedly and kept reminding me about putting the slides online. I really appreciate your patience. The slides do not make up for the talk so if you find yourself with a question, please feel free to shoot an email. You can find my email address in the header of my blog.

Also, big thanks to Warren Habib, my boss, who was there to provide his support.

- MySQL and Lucene
- Fotolog: Scaling the world's largest photo blogging community (We have now crossed 100 million page views a day and are ranked as the 24th most visited site on the Internet by Alexa.)

For all those who have sent me an email, please bear with me as I will be sending a personal reply to everyone.