After a long pause in the speaking game, I am back.

It's since April that I haven't been on stage, and it is now time to resume my public duties.

• I will speak at MySQL Connect in San Francisco, just at the start of Oracle Open World, with a talk on MySQL High Availability: Power and Usability. It is about the cool technology that is keeping me busy here at Continuent, which can make life really easy for DBAs. This talk will be a demo fest. If you are attending MySQL Connect, you should see it!
• A happy return for me. On October 27th I will talk about open source databases and the pleasures of command line operations at

ConFoo is one of the most important web developer-oriented conferences. ConFoo 2013 will be held on February 25 through March 1 in Montreal, Canada.

We just opened call for papers and we are looking for the best PHP, Java, Ruby, DotNet,HTML5 experts who are willing to share their knowledge with the Canadian community. Candidates can submit proposals until September 23. Consult the call for papers page for details and to start submitting. That page also explains what expenses ConFoo can cover for speakers. You can also get advice on how to write proposals.

The call for papers is public, meaning that all proposals get published on the website for others to

Why demos?

For as long as I can remember in my public speaking activities, I have always planned my presentations with some sort of live demo in it. I am always surprised when a conference venue asks me to provide my slides in advance, to be loaded in an anonymous computer with no chance of demos. I always turn down such offers, as I always want to provide a demo.

There have been times when technical or time constraints prevented me from demoing something, and in these cases I felt that the presentation was lacking a vital part. But I always try. I have even given demos during lightning talks, and those were the ones that made me feel really good.

I have given hundreds of presentations, and hundreds of demos, and as in every human activity, I have made plenty of mistakes. I believe I have learned some valuable lesson from my mistakes, and this

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

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

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”

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

For those of you coming to the High Availability Deep Dive tutorial that Yves Trudeau and myself will be co-presenting next Tuesday, here's advance information which you will find useful.

Now updated and fixed for Planet MySQL. Sorry about the earlier inconvenience.

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PC World has written a post with this title(*) about the upcoming MySQL Connect conference and references the Percona Live conference and an official Percona comment. As this is not syndicated in Planet MySQL I encourage you to read the full article.

This is the MySQL conference to get technical presentations by the many great Oracle/MySQL technical staff who will not be in attendance at Percona Live. There will also be a strong community presence in speaking at Oracle Connect in September. While Oracle was organizing a dedicated MySQL event in April for the community with all vendors including Percona to replace the conference dropped by long

After 15 years of slide show technology, I thought that we need to change the way we do presentations. And since I am advocating radical changes, I will eat my own dog food and be the first to present a MySQL session using 3D technology.

Since watching Avatar a few years ago, I thought that using this technology would make my presentations truly amazing. However, two years ago a 3d projector was prohibitively expensive. Now, instead, it is affordable, and fits in my briefcase!

What I needed, though, was a compelling reason for using 3d vs. traditional presentations. And I found it. As I have mentioned recently, I am working with the coolest replication technology on earth. Explaining this technology