RICON Recap
RICON. RICON was a distributed systems conference hosted by Basho Technologies and the event sponsors. The event was, hands down, a smashing success.
Yes, the conference was put on by a software company, but this was different than most conferences put on by a vendor. RICON was clearly a conference put on by people who love building distributed systems. All of the talks were given by people building distributed systems in the wild. There were no marketing talks, but there were talks about new features, new ideas, and new products all viewed through the lens of distributed systems.
Both Adron Hall (@adron) and Dan Ostrowski put together good write ups about the talks that they enjoyed. If you want to know more about the talks themselves, check out their posts or start reading the presentations while you wait for the videos. The quality of the presentations was incredibly high and I was not disappointed.
What made RICON great was the focus on the attendees and the community. It was clear that the organizers went out of their way to make sure that attendees had a great time. From the custom hoodies and beautiful signage to vegan meal options and amazing vendor-sponsored party I felt like I was at something bigger and better than a conference. This felt like an inclusive social event where I could learn with and from my technical peers, make new friends, and feel like the dumbest person in the room in the best way possible. It’s not every day that you get to go to dinner with the keynote speaker, a distributed systems researcher, and a team of engineers building a distributed monitoring platform for distributed systems.
RICON drastically changed my reading list. While it’s never been a short list, I’ve re-organized it to help fill up the gaps in my knowledge that this event pointed out. The reading isn’t just about distributed systems – I’ve added reading about databases, programming, networkings, and even from the humanities. In short – RICON did more than get me thinking about distributed systems can solve the problems I see regularly. RICON got me thinking.
Was the conference worth it? Heck yeah. I got to meet up with old friends, make new friends, and learn a lot about a subject I’m passionate about. I’m happy that Mark Phillips (one of the organizers) reminded me that I should buy a ticket before they sold out (the conference did sell out, by the way). I’m happy that I got a chance to go. And I can promise you that if there’s a RICON 2013, I’m going to try to be the first person to buy a ticket.
You wish your hoodie was this awesome.
Learn to Speak DBA Slang
Ever wonder what those big-company DBAs are saying when they start busting out the cryptic terms? Learn the slang of database administrators with this handy reference guide.
Wizard of Oz – admin who makes everyone think things are automated, but he’s really just duct taping things together. “The executives think we’ve got a reporting dashboard, but the Wizard of Oz over there is just copy/pasting data into Excel and hitting Insert Chart before he prints it out.”
Food court – consolidated server with a bunch of unrelated databases. Typically not known for high quality. “The marketing team wants to install a social media program that needs a database, but they don’t have any budget. Put them in the food court.”
The last guy – the speaker in a previous time frame, like yesterday. Used for blaming someone else when it’s the speaker’s own fault.
How RAID 0 looks in the ads.
Photo by Soapbeard
Ride the unicycle – use RAID 0. “The food court was begging for faster performance, so the last guy decided to ride the unicycle.”
Suicide – killing your own query.
Genocide – killing all queries from a certain application
Two Men and a Truck – generic name for ETL programs like SQL Server Integration Services, Informatica, and DataStage. “We need a nightly job to get data from the sales system to the reporting server. Call Two Men and a Truck.”
Play Tetris – shrinking databases on a server with limited space. “We ran out of space on the L drive again. Run interference while I play Tetris.”
Tinted windows – encryption. “Tell the developers to put tinted windows on the web site database before somebody puts our password list on WikiLeaks.”
Van down by the river – server running ancient, unsupported software. Named because it’s the last thing a database ever sees before it shuffles off this mortal coil.
Blimp – monitoring software. “Jobs are failing all over the place. How’s it look from the blimp?”
100% delicious.
Photo by elizaIO
The Bakery – the department that produces pie charts. Sometimes referred to as Bakery Incorporated.
Escalate it to the documentation team – search Google.
Open a global support ticket – create a StackOverflow question.
56K modem – PCI Express solid state drive like FusionIO or OCZ Z-Drive. Named for their physical resemblance.
Keyser Soze – DBA or developer who looks ordinary but has insanely good skills, hardly anybody knows about it. Taken from the movie The Usual Suspects where the mythical main villain, Keyser Soze, is right in the middle of the group the whole time.
Smoking filtered cigarettes – doing something that appears safe but is really still dangerous.
Groundhog Day – ETL job that reloads all data from scratch every day rather than efficiently processing just the changed data. “The Wizard of Oz populates the database alright – it’s Groundhog Day at midnight.”
Saving Private Ryan – trying to do a row-level restore. Management usually calls for this task without understanding the complexity.
Fireworks store – dangerous server that crashes all the time. “Ever since the Wizard of Oz started writing his own backup software, the food court is turning into a fireworks store.”
Health Insurance – a current backup. “Make sure he has health insurance before you put a 56k modem in him.”
Read the paper – scan the event log looking for problems. “The job failed again last night. I’m going to read the paper.”
Group of blade servers in the wild.
Photo by Kismihok
Trailer park – blade server chassis. “The manufacturing team is bringing in a few new apps next quarter. Is there space in the trailer park?”
Blue jeans – full backups nightly.
Business casual – full backups nightly, log shipping every few minutes. “Does the new project server need blue jeans or business casual?”
Three piece suit – intricate high availability and disaster recovery strategy including clustering, mirroring, and log shipping.
Take a picture, it’ll last longer – advises the listener to perform a snapshot backup to make rollbacks easier. “You’ve been staring at that deployment script for an hour now. Take a picture, it’ll last longer.”
Value meal – Standard Edition server with the database engine, SSIS, SSAS, and SSRS all installed. “They needed SharePoint in a hurry so I gave ‘em a value meal.”
Updating the last step in the Disaster Recovery Plan – working on your résumé.
