Oracle OpenWorld can be pretty intimidating. Besides the extra fifty thousand bodies in an around Moscone Center in San Francisco, there is an overload of amazing information that bombards you from all directions. And then comes the really hard decision of which sessions to attend. This year MySQL has three rooms being used for sessions.

The Catalog of sessions shows over 1800 session and MySQL is the subject of fifty three of those. The problem is that you can not be in three places at once!

For example on Monday morning there are two tutorials and a great session at the same time.

• MySQL Essentials—Getting Started with MySQL [TUT2356]
  Ligaya Isler-turmelle, Principle Technical Support Engineer, Oracle
  Jeremy Smyth, Course/Curriculum Developer, Oracle
  Monday, Oct 26, 11:00 a.m. | Moscone South—254
• MySQL Replication Tips and Tricks [TUT5467]
  Joao Gramacho, Software Developer, Oracle
  Monday, Oct 26, 11:00 a.m. | Moscone South—250
• Architecture and Design for MySQL-Powered Applications [CON5041]
  Peter Zaitsev, CEO, Percona Inc
  Monday, Oct 26, 11:00 a.m. | Moscone South—262

Another example?

• MySQL Server Performance Tuning 101 [CON2353]
  Ligaya Isler-turmelle, Principle Technical Support Engineer, Oracle
  Tuesday, Oct 27, 12:15 p.m. | Moscone South—262
• Yahoo Case Study: MySQL GTIDs and Parallel or Multithreaded Replication [CON5409]
  Yashada Jadhav, MySQL DBA, Yahoo
  Stacy Yuan, Sr. MySQL DBA, Yahoo
  Tuesday, Oct 27, 12:15 p.m. | Moscone South—250
• Feed Your Streams: Zendesk’s Maxwell Generates Kafka Event Stream from MySQL Binlogs [CON3340]
  Ben Osheroff, Principle Engineer, zendesk.com

If you are a first time attendee, make sure you arrive early for your desired sessions. Rooms fill very quickly and some talks will be standing room only. And there are some talks where you may not get in so have a secondary target. Take advantage of the Session Builder software and plan strategically.

And be sure to RSVP for the community reception Tuesday night and avoid the signup lines.