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

Wow! 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 MySQL. In spite of all the changes in technology, ownership, versions, …

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 tools
…

Monty gave a keynote on Wednesday morning, on the State of MariaDB. He’s also just posted his thoughts and updates from the conference. Check out his slide deck embedded blow, and don’t forget you can also watch the video (running time ~30 minutes).

State of MariaDB View more presentations from Monty Program

In my presentation tomorrow at the MySQL Conference I plan to talk about some aspects of PBXT that I have never spoken about before. Here are the details of the presentation:

Update on the PBXT Storage Engine
10:50am Wednesday, 04/13/2011
Location: Ballroom D

Of course nothing about the engine is really a secret, if you are prepared to read the code. But who does that right? I am pretty sure that not even developers of other engines have spent much time (if any) on that.

But really, there are some gems stuck away in those X 1000 lines of code, and I plan to pick out a few tomorrow and show them to you. So don't miss it! :)

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 …

Next week I'll stay at Hyatt Santa Clara to attend the MySQL Conference and Expo 2011. This year I'll present one tutorial and two sessions.

- Linux and H/W optimizations for MySQL (Apr 11, 9:00-12:30)

- Automated, Non-Stop MySQL Operations and Failover (Apr 12, 15:05-15:50)

- Using MySQL As NoSQL - Introduction to HandlerSocket Plugin (Apr 13, 17:15-18:00) (Co-present with Kazuho Oku. He is a former employee at Cybozu Labs, and recently joined DeNA. He is an author of Q4M and MyCached(origin of HandlerSocket))

These talks will be based on my experiences as a former MySQL consultant and our experiences from running …

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 are now closed, contact Brian Aker — he’ll try and help …

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 9.30am, we have The Next Decade in Data Management, a keynote given by Mike Olson, CEO of Cloudera. More and more I see people using …

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 performance and …