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 :)

New York MySQL Meetup

Yesterday night, I presented "Scaling InnoDB for Fotolog" at the New York MySQL Meetup. Judging from the number of questions, and how many people stayed after the presentation was over, I can say that it was a success.

I was very excited when I saw Partha Dutta (of Right Media) enter the room. Had really good chat with folks from New York Times.

Later, Kerry Ancheta, Partha, Michelle and I went to Les Halles. I had "cotes d'Agneau grillees au Romarin", which was really yummy.

A big thanks to Marc Simony of Logic Works for inviting me to speak and for sponsoring the event.

New York Tech Meetup

Tonight, I went for the first time to the NY Tech Meetup. (Meetup's founder is also Fotolog's co-founder).

Ever wanted to create your own television station And be able to professionally produce live shows just like your favorite cable tv channel? What about being able to instantly add any video from YouTube, Revver or other video sharing sites? And what if all this was free? Close your mouth, I can see your mouth watering already.

Check out what I honestly think has the potential to be ground breaking: Mogulus. I had the chance to meet and see Max Haot, CEO of Mogulus, at the NY Tech Meetup. The entire interface is flash based and therefore no download is necessary.

I think Mogulus seems to be using S3 and EC2 as Max answered a question about CDN by making a reference to Amazon's bandwidth. If so, seems like a perfect match for EC2 and S3.

Mogulus excited me, but the highlight of the NY Tech Meetup tonight was David Weinberger, an excellent speaker and author of "Everything is Miscellaneous." David's presentation was one of the fastest (in terms of words per minute) presentation that I have ever attended. Yet, it made perfect sense.

As someone who is very passionate about data mining, information retrieval and latent semantic analysis, I found David's definition to be eye opening. It's amazing how you live and breathe one thing and then suddenly a few words make you think that's all you have been wanting to here. I will provide the definition here but it has a context to which ithttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif belongs which must be understood to really appreciate this definition. The classical way to define metadata is that it is "data about data." David takes this definition to one step further and says that metadata is data itself and that "metadata is what users know" and "data is what they are searching for."

Some other ideas presented were: GoLoco, ExpoTv and LiveLook.

BTW, at the next New York MySQL Meetup, I am presenting a session on scaling InnoDB. If you are in New York, stop by for a few drinks (and to attend the presentation :) )