MySQLBoy attends the annual MySQL Conference and Expo host by Percona. [part 1 of 2]

Day 1 is the first official day of the Percona Live MySQL Conference. It began with two mini keynotes by Peter Zaitev and Baron Schwarz of Percona talking about the history of MySQL and his beginnings in the open source movement, respectively. It was very nostalgic, and I’m sure it brought a tear to a few people’s eyes.

Following the dynamic duo was full keynotes by Mårten Mickos (Eucalyptus Systems) on “Making LAMP a Cloud” and Brian Aker (HP) on “The New MySQL Cloud Ecosystem”. To be honest, I found the full keynotes to be quite disappointing. For me, the keynotes speeches should be about a topic that is visionary or notable in some way. What I got from the keynotes were:  MySQL is good, MySQL is growing, let me show you my product around MySQL, and buy/use my product. They felt far more like glorified sales pitches.

I remember that at the last conference I attended, SXSW Interactive, the keynotes by Ray …

Day 0 of the MySQL Conference was a day unlike any other day. It was, in fact, tutorial day. While regular days of the Percona Live MySQL Conference feature 50 minute sessions, usually split into a 40 minute talk and a 5-10 minute question period, tutorials are 3-hour-long sessions (with a generous 10 minute break in the middle for those that wish to go to the WC) that provide an in-depth dive into some aspect of MySQL. Due to the length of the tutorials, they are more in-depth and technical than individual sessions can be, but at the same time, we are limited to 2 tutorials slots per day instead of the 5 for sessions.The tutorial schedule for the conference is located here, and with so many good ones, it was hard to choose which one(s) to go to.For the morning session, I attended Peter Zaitev’s tutorial entitled “InnoDB and XtraDB …

The Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo 2012 is over. Together with the SkySQL solutions day, it has kept me occupied for 4 full days, from early morning to late at night.

I have to say that I am pleased. The quality of the organization was very high, with a very good lineup of speakers and an excellent technical support.

As usual, I have learned a lot during this week, either directly, by attending talks, or indirectly, by meeting people who told me what was juicy at the talks that I had missed. And I have met new interesting people, and caught up with the people that I know already.

This conference was particularly intense also because I got myself involved in 5 talks, which was probably more than I should have. How did I end up with such a task? It's a long story. …

It is the day after the conference ended and I feel great. Two days of percona live and a day of skysql, drizzle and sphynx presentations were just awesome. I can say that IMHO it is one of the best MySQL conferences since I started attending four years ago. Well done Percona.

There were some great tracks by very very smart people and I have started compiling my list of things to build/setup to make my own deployment better, faster and easier to manage. Full track list can be found: http://www.percona.com/live/mysql-conference-2012/

I should also thank SkySQL and MariaDB for the free days of sessions I attended yesterday, organized and delivered by these two community focussed companies.

This week, I had the pleasure of speaking at the Percona Live MySQL Conference & Expo. This was the first year it was not the O'Reilly MySQL Conference & Expo, and also the first time Oracle was not involved in any way. And what can I say, Terry Erisman and his team at Percona have put together an awe-inspiring conference.

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A panel on “Future Perfect: The Road Ahead for MySQL“, by Brian Aker (HP), Paul Mikesell (Clustrix), Sundar Raghavan (Amazon), Slavik Markovich (McAffee), and Ori Hernstadt (Akiban).

If there’s one common theme to this panel and  this whole conference, it’s: “We’re hiring!” It is amazing how much talent there is at the conference this year, and yet, it isn’t enough. Pythian is hiring as well of course: http://bit.ly/pythianjobs.

There was an interesting distinction between the mindset of Oracle and of MySQL made by Brian Aker: database as a service, which is something MySQL seems to be getting to. It comes with its own problems, especially around trust levels, which will lead to more thinking around data security (rather than just database security).

MySQL vs. NoSQL. Different Tools for Different Jobs …

Here it is finally: The MySQL conference 2012 starts with the Keynote Sessions.

The first keynote speech was by Peter Zaitsev, founder of Percona and a very smart guy, and by Baron Schwartz (Percona), another very smart guy, the brain behind a number of toolkits for MySQL. They’re talking about the MySQL Evolution – what I alluded to in my first post regarding this conference – the ways in which MySQL has grown, evolved, scaled and continues to make new inroads into new applications and industries.

From Peter: “What is most important hasn’t changed – MySQL is still a great piece of technology and it is evolving very rapidly.” (Love that quote!) Also “MySQL is also buzzword compatible: NoSQL, BigData.”

From Baron: He talked about his own personal journey from closed-source, proprietory to open-source, and the …

Pedro’s dinner was full! I didn’t count, but we had 9 tables of 8-10 people or so – dare I say almost 100 people? Lots of beer, margaritas, and good conversations! Here are a few pictures from the event:

Wow! A lot has changed since the last MySQL conference I blogged about in 2007.

MySQL has been acquired twice: once as MySQL by Sun and the second time around bundled with Sun when Oracle bought Sun. The conference is no longer organized by O’Reilly but by Percona. And the MySQL database itself has changed — we were talking about new features in MySQL 5.1, which wasn’t released yet, along with Falcon (where did it go?). 5.1 has long since been released as has 5.5, and we’re now talking about 5.6 instead of 6.0. There was no “Cloud” on the horizon, nor was there MariaDB, XtraDB, Drizzle, Schooner, or any of the other offshoots of MySQL, all of which are creating a new buzz around the product.

Yet, one thing remains constant: the vibrant community around MySQL. In spite of all the changes in technology, ownership, versions, …