Although, hosting the event on a weekend, which is an inconvenience to those who have family, and ignoring the fact that it's Oracle's third MySQL Connect event, I would have to say that this year's Oracle MySQL Connect conference was the best one yet.

This past year, I have been mostly heads-down working at +LinkedIn so I haven't been paying close attention to what Oracle has been doing for +

There’s nothing like hearing directly from the developers.  As an Oracle employee, I’ve already learned a lot about MySQL 5.6 and other recent updates.  Nevertheless, I was impressed with a few new updates mentioned during the keynote.  Here’s a list of items that caught my attention (disclaimer: this is a partial list)

**Performance — with the group commit feature in 5.6 and other 5.6 performance improvements, the overhead of sync_binlog=1 is less than 10%.  In fact, with binlog enabled, 5.6 is faster than 5.5 without binlog enabled.

**Audit Extension — Oracle offers a dynamic plugin for enabling auditing for Sarbanes Oxley, PCI Compliance…  (note: this is a commercial feature which requires a subscription)

**Foreign Key support in MySQL Cluster — I find it ironic that at the same time NoSQL is becoming more popular; we’re also seeing very high demand for foreign key support in …

At the end of September, the MySQL Connect 2012 conference will be held as part of Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco. MySQL Connect is a two day event that allows attendees to focus on MySQL at a technical depth with presentations and interaction with many of the MySQL developers, engineers and other knowledgeable staff. There is also a range a international speakers to give broader knowledge to the presentations.

I am presenting a Hands-On Lab on Sunday 30th September 16:15 - 17:15 entitled HOL10474 - MySQL Security: Authentication and Auditing. The sessions goes through an introduction to the plugin API and how it can help expand the capabilities of MySQL. Since it is a hands-on lab, …