Day 1 is the fist official day of the Percona Live MySQL Conference; the day began with two mini-keynotes by Peter Zaitev and Baron Schwarz of Percona talking about the history of MySQL and how he got started in the open source movement respectively. Very nostalgic and I’m sure it brought a tear to a few people’s eyes.

Following the dynamic duo was full keynotes by followed by Mårten Mickos (Eucalyptus Systems) speaking 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. For me, they felt far more like

Even without attending the Percona Live conference in Santa Clara, you could tell something big was going on.

One way of measuring it was by looking at the flow of announcements. Here's a brief list, and apologies if I've missed anyone:

• Monty Program Announcing MariaDB 5.3. (and later Announcing MariaDB 5.5.23 GA)
• Tokutek Announcing TokuDB v6.0
• Twitter releasing its own MySQL fork
• Oracle announcing so many new features I can't list them all. But they made a

In about 4 hours, at 2PM PDT, I’ll be giving my talk “Security Around MySQL” at Ballroom A at the Percona Live MySQL Conference 2012. It’s a summary and guide of practical and easy-to-implement security tips around MySQL and the application. These tips were all gleamed from my years at start-ups (some which I worked at and some which I founded) and from experience at Pythian.

The details are here:  http://www.percona.com/live/mysql-conference-2012/sessions/security-around-mysql.

A panel on “Future Perfect: The Road Ahead for MySQL”

Brian Aker (HP), Paul Mikesell (Clustrix), Sundar Raghavan (Amazon), Slavik Markovich (McAffee), Ori Hernstadt (Akiban)

If there’s one common theme to this panel, and indeed, this whole conference, it is “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

Interesting differenciation between the mindset of Oracle from MySQL from 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

Security is definitely a big topic these days other than performance.

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

The first keynote speech is by Peter Zaitsev, founder of Percona and a very smart guy and also by Baron Schwartz (Percona), another very smart guy, the brains 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 – they 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: his own

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

Wow what 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

Are you attending PerconaLive?

Allow me to suggest you attend the Common Schema: a framework for MySQL server administration session on April 12, 14:00 - 14:50 @ Ballroom F.

This talk is by none other than Roland Bouman. Roland co-authored parts of common_schema, and is a great speaker.

I have a personal interest, of course, being the author of most of the components in common_schema. I would like to convert you to a supporter of this project. I know a few very smart people who think this project is an important tool. I would like more people to get to know it. Eventually, I would like developers and DBAs alike to consider it

This post complements Henrik's Call for Nominations for 2012 MySQL Community Awards.

Recap: we keep the tradition of awarding MySQL community members for their notable contributions to the MySQL ecosystem.

Previously, the awards were given by MySQL AB/Sun. Later on they were given by the community itself, as will follow this year, when the awards are presented during the Percona Live MySQL Conference & Expo in Santa Clara, this April.

Henrik describes in details the three categories: community contributor, application, corporate contributer -of the year.

A bit more about the categories

To add to Henrik's description of the categories, keep in mind the

As a member of the conference committee I review the session and tutorial proposals for the Percona Live MySQL conference in Santa Clara, 2012.

The sessions are expected to be technical, and I'm happy the proposals follow this guideline. I use Giuseppe's and Baron's general guidelines for submitting a proposal. I wish to humbly add a couple notes myself.

Be fairly brief

Explain your session/tutorial as clearly as you can. The reader should be able to get the general impression of the session

I have a bunch of notes from the O’Reilly MySQL Conference & Expo 2011, and I figure its about time I started blogging it. These are notes from the panel on the SkySQL Reference Architecture, led by Kaj Arno and Ivan Zoratti. The notes are raw (read their FAQ for more), and I talk a little bit about the SkySQL Configurator at the end (a tool I immediately used, and submitted some bugs/improvements for – 7 at last count, which I hear got fixed in the 0.02 release, which got pushed last night!).

There were 7 panelists. The MySQL world needs:

• technical support
• monitoring & administration

This post concludes my impressions from some of the talks I’ve been to.

Thursday

• OQGRAPH: Dealing with Graphs and Hierarchies in Plain SQL / Antony Curtis (Blizzard Entertainment)

I opened this day’s sessions with a smile.

Antony Curtis and Arjen Lentz have authored the OQGraph storage engine a while back. I had every intention to try it out, but never got round to it. Which is why I was happy to find this session in the conference. OQGraph is a specialized engine, and comes to solve hierarchal or otherwise graph-related queries, such as: “who are the descendants of a given node”, “find a route from a to b”, etc. MySQL does not support the RECURSIVE syntax as Oracle does, and does

This post continues my impressions from some of the talks I’ve been to. I’ll dedicate this post to a single session.

Wednesday

• BoF: Replication, Lars Thalmann, Mat Keep (Oracle)

Lars Thallman presented the MySQL 5.5 replication features, as well as the expected 5.6 features. Among other features, one could notice parallel replication, binlog checksums, sub-second resolution and more. There was an open discussion about these features, asking for comments; looking for new ideas and suggestion from the audience.

I can’t possibly cover it all. I’ll note two discussion I participated in, and which have interested me. This also serves for noting down to myself my ideas and thoughts.

Parallel replication

As the trend goes, parallel replication will be implemented

This post continues my impressions from some of the talks I’ve been to.

Wednesday

• Replication for Availability & Durability with MySQL and Amazon RDS / Grant McAlister (Amazon.com)

Grant McAlister described the Amazon RDS offer, which provides with a pre-installed MySQL servers, and supports auto management of replication and high availability. He desribed asynchronous vs. synchronous replication, logical (i.e log shipping & replaying) vs. physical replication.

Amazon implement physical replication by shipping data pages to a secondary, standby server, located at a different availability zone. A transaction does not complete before pages are shipped to, and acknowledged by standby machine. The standby machine writes data pages in

Having the conference behind now, I’m reviewing some of my impressions and of sessions I attended.

The people

To begin with, this conference was a big success for me, in many respects. The sessions were great (more on that later), but of course, meeting with new people and with familiar people, was the more important part.

I live in Israel, which makes travel to the US very long and expensive. Apparently not many MySQL community members in my neighborhood, so I don’t ever get to meet the faces. The conference makes that possible. I did not participate in all community events, as I had scheduled calls with little girls who miss their father. And I was very much under jet lag. And I have more excuses on demand.

But I did get to meet known faces; people I only knew by name; unfamiliar people who were familiar with my work (fun!); and

Today I have delivered my talk, openark-kit: MySQL utilities for everyday use, at the O’REILLY  MySQL Conference 2011.

The slides are uploaded to the O’Reilly site, and I’m attaching them here as well. Feel free to download the PDF: openark-kit-mysqlconf11.pdf

I wish to thank all who attended my talk!

I’m giving two talks tomorrow (Tuesday) at the MySQL Conference and Expo:

HailDB: A NoSQL API direct to InnoDB, 2:00pm, Ballroom D

Dropping ACID: Eating Data In A Web 2.0 Cloud World 3:05pm, Ballroom G

The HailDB talk is all about a C API to embed an InnoDB based relational database engine into your application. Awesome stuff (also nice and technical).

The second talk, “Dropping ACID: Eating Data in a Web 2.0 Cloud World” is not only a joke that only database people get, but a humorous and serious look at data integrity and reliability as promised by the current hype. This was quite well received at linux.conf.au in January. So, if you weren’t in Australia in January this year, then certainly come along and see how you go heckling an Australian.

If you’ve been busy and haven’t registered yet, remember that early-bird pricing ends on 31/03/2011. From April 1-10, you’ll have to pay USD$100 more. A discount code for use (I think you save 20-25%): mys11fsd.

We’re full up in terms of the schedule. People are still asking for an opportunity to speak, and there are still opportunities in the Products & Services track. Please contact Yvonne Romaine at yromaine@oreilly.com for more information on this.

Might I also suggest that if you want to speak and there’s no longer an opportunity, you submit a five-minute talk for the Ignite MySQL event. Even though submissions

I’m still throwing papers to the trash and starting all over, fixing, rewriting and improving my talk at mysqlconf 2011, where I will be presenting openark-kit: MySQL utilities for everyday use.

However I’ve got something up my sleeve: a benefit many can enjoy, that’ll make me a respectful, popular and sought after speaker. While others may try and lure you with such earthly temptations as a 20% off discount, I am in a position to offer you a more spiritual gift: my friendship!

See, if you become my friend, I can offer you a 25% discount on the MySQL conference. Yes, that’s 5% more than my competitors! The only thing I ask in return is

A quick update on a few keynotes that the O’Reilly MySQL Conference & Expo 2011 managed to recently close:

• The opening keynote, The State of the Dolphin, given by none other than Tomas Ulin, who is currently the VP of the MySQL Engineering team at Oracle. I am told that this is not just a “what’s new” and “what’s coming up”, as there will also be a Q&A session with an analyst, customer, and Tomas. You must not miss this on Tuesday morning at 9am, 12th April 2011.
• On Thursday at

I’ll be presenting several sessions at the O’Reilly MySQL Conference & Expo 2011, which is April 11-14 in Santa Clara, California. I recommend this conference to anyone interested in open-source databases including MySQL, PostgreSQL, CouchDB, MongoDB, and others. There is very good coverage of a diverse list of open-source databases.

My sessions are as follows:

• Building on Strengths, Learning from Differences: a keynote address on the open-source database ecosystem, how we got here, and what we can do to make the most of the future.
• Forecasting MySQL Performance and Scalability: mathematical models for forecasting