Colin Charles is the Managing Consultant at GrokOpen. Previously, Colin was on the founding team of MariaDB Server, and has been around the MySQL ecosystem including being an early employee at MySQL, and worked actively on the Fedora and OpenOffice.org projects. Colin has been a MySQL user since 2000. He's well known within open source communities, enjoys building business and market entry in APAC and has spoken at many conferences.

Presentations

22x

Understanding PostgreSQL for the MySQL Developer and DBA

This focused technical session provides MySQL DBAs and developers with essential knowledge for understanding PostgreSQL's key differences and similarities. The session prioritizes practical, high-impact distinctions that affect day-to-day operations and development.

 

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22x

CloudOps for your databases: a new paradigm for managing your data stores

We went from running databases in a typical LAMP stack, to building databases to run in cloud like environments, to actually just running database in the hosted cloud (or a self-run hosted platform like Kubernetes). The principles of running your data stores, however, have not changed, and still require: monitoring, instrumentation, management, compliance, high availability, optimised performance, security, capacity planning, and keeping up with the SLAs. 

 

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20x

Best Practices for MySQL High Availability in 2023

The MySQL world is full of trade-offs, and choosing a High Availability (HA) solution is no exception. This session aims to look at all of the alternatives in an unbiased nature. 

Coverage will include: ProxySQL, MySQL InnoDB Cluster, Galera Cluster and its variants, and how the different servers handle HA. External tools like Orchestrator, and cloud offerings will also be covered.

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17x

Managing MySQL (and MariaDB Server) in the hosted cloud

Many workloads are now run in a managed instance of MySQL or MariaDB now, fondly known as database as as service (DBaaS). How do you effectively manage and operate an instance of the database server that you don't normally have full access to? This talk will cover the manageability, observability, scalability, high availability and the security of your managed database instance. There will be a focus on Amazon RDS MySQL/MariaDB, Amazon Aurora RDS MySQL, Google Cloud SQL, Azure Database for MySQL/MariaDB, as well as Alibaba Cloud RDS MySQL.

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17x

The MySQL Diaspora

MySQL was acquired by Sun Microsystems 11 years ago, and it would be 10 years this April that Oracle acquired Sun becoming the new steward of MySQL. In parallel a number of distributions based on the original MySQL have emerged, including MariaDB and Percona. Many web-scale companies and cloud providers such as Facebook and Google have also become maintainers or contributors in this ecosystem. Join us as we dive into the thriving MySQL diaspora and learn how these open source communities compete and collaborate on the open source database database that powers the modern web.

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16x

Capacity Planning for your Data Stores

Databases (referred here as data stores, since some modern ones prefer to be referred to as stores) require capacity planning (and to those coming from traditional RDBMS solutions, this can be thought of as a sizing guide). Capacity planning prevents resource exhaustion. Capacity planning can be hard. This talk has a heavier leaning on MySQL, but the concepts and addendum will help with any other data store.

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15x

MySQL/MariaDB Server security essentials

This presentation will discuss the features of MySQL/MariaDB that when enabled and used improve the default usage of MySQL.

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15x

Best Practices for MySQL High Availability in 2017

The MySQL world is full of tradeoffs and choosing a High Availability (HA) solution is no exception. This session aims to look at all of the alternatives in an unbiased nature. Preference is of course only given to opensource solutions. 

 

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14x

The MySQL Server Ecosystem in 2016

MySQL is a unique adult (now 21 years old) in many ways. It has spawned Percona Server, MariaDB Server and WebScaleSQL. Let's deep-dive into what feature differences exist between MySQL/Percona Server/MariaDB/WebScaleSQL.

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13x

MySQL in the Hosted Cloud

Today you can use hosted MySQL/MariaDB/Percona Server in several "cloud providers" in what is considered using it as a service, a database as a service (DBaaS). Learn the differences, the access methods, and the level of control you have for the various public cloud offerings:

- Amazon RDS

- Google Cloud SQL

- HPCloud DBaaS

- Rackspace OpenStack DBaaS

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