My post-FOSDEM detox has started - despite preparing by reading some survival guides, I hadn't really fathomed the variety and quantity (and quality) of beer that would flow over four days.  On reflection however, the beer flow has been far exceeded by the flow of tech content and conversation.

On Thursday and Friday I attended the pre-FOSDEM MySQL Days fringe event, where there were two tracks of talks and tutorials on MySQL including sessions on :
 - MySQL Server simplification
 - MySQL replication tooling improvements
 - Configuring group replication
 - Troubleshooting group replication
 - Using DNS for loadbalancing and failover
 - Upgrading to MySQL 8.0 …

The call for participation for Percona Live Data Performance Conference 2016 is still open. Deadline for submission is November 29th.

There are two immediately noticeable novelties in this edition:

• The name change. Not "MySQL & Expo" but "Data Performance Conference." It makes the conference open to a broader set of topics.
• The community voting. Proposals can get evaluated by the community before the review committee takes decisions.

I think it's a good choice. Other conferences adopt the same method. The attendees choose what they want to see and hear. In this case, it's mixed method, where the community voting is used as an indication for the review committee, which, by my understanding, has the final say.

Vote for my proposals!

Below are my proposals. Clicking on the links below …

It's Oracle OpenWorld time, and MySQL Cluster will be in San Francisco again along with the rest of the MySQL team. 

The session agenda is online, but can be tricky to navigate given the breadth of the conference, but it's possible to narrow down to those sessions in the MySQL track.

From a MySQL Cluster perspective, there two conference sessions from the Cluster development team, a Hands-On Lab from our Cluster Support team and most …

The Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo 2013 is almost 1 month away. It's time to start planning, set the expectations, and decide what to attend. This post will give a roundup of some of the sessions that I recommend attending and I look forward to.

First, the unexpected!

After much talk and disbelief, here they come! Oracle engineers will participate to the Percona Live conference. This is wonderful! Their participation was requested by the organizers, by the attendees, and by community advocates, who all told the Oracle management how important it is to be in this conference. Finally, they have …

On Monday afternoon, Neal Armitage and I will be speaking at Percona Live in London. It will be a three hours tutorial about Tungsten replicator.

The contents of this tutorial are mostly new. We have released recently a new and easier way of installing different topologies, in the shape of cookbook scripts, which are distributed with the replicator tarball.

Using this cookbook, any user can simply install multiple topologies, from the simple master/slave to all-masters, fan-in, and star.

There are recipes for showing the replication cluster, switching roles between master and a chosen slave, taking over MySQL replication, installing direct slaves with parallel replication, testing each topology, and uninstalling all.

All the above will be demonstrated during the tutorial, with the addition of conflict prevention and more management …

The first day of the first MySQL Connect conference is done.  It's been a busy day!  Many attendees are interested in the new MySQL Server 5.6 release, but of course MySQL Cluster is the main draw here.  After a session from Oracle on the new features in 7.2, and early access features in 7.3, I attended Santo Leto's MySQL Cluster 'hands on lab'.  Despite having started more clusters than most, it felt like a new and exciting experience installing and running my cluster alongside everyone else.  The lab machines had some networking issues, but with Santo's help we seamlessly failed-over to some downloads he'd prepared earlier - very professional!

Afterwards it was my turn to talk on the subject of MySQL Cluster performance.  The quality of the questions was impressive - there seems to be a very capable crowd in San Francisco this …

I will double my all-time total of public speaking engagements this September at the MySQL Connect conference in San Fransisco.

The title of my session is "Delivering Breakthrough Performance with MySQL Cluster", and it's between 17:30 and 18:30 on Saturday 29th September.

The content is not finalised yet, so if there's something you would like to hear about which fits with the abstract, then comment below.  If it doesn't fit in with the abstract then we …

I will be speaking in the MySQL track of the UK Oracle User Group conference on 5th December in Birmingham UK. The title of the session is "Building Highly Available and Scalable, Real Time Services with MySQL Cluster" - full details here.

I'm not a regular conference attendee, never mind speaker. However I'm looking forward to meeting current and potential MySQL users, and also attending some of the talks in the MySQL and other tracks. Maybe I can learn something about RAC, or Exadata?

If you are attending and want to talk about MySQL or MySQL Cluster then please track me down and say hello.

Note that this is the first picture I have included in 3 years of posts - maybe …