Day 1 is the first official day of the Percona Live MySQL Conference. It began with two mini keynotes by Peter Zaitev and Baron Schwarz of Percona talking about the history of MySQL and his beginnings in the open source movement, respectively. It was very nostalgic, and I’m sure it brought a tear to a few people’s eyes.

Following the dynamic duo was full keynotes by Mårten Mickos (Eucalyptus Systems) 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. They felt far more like glorified sales pitches.

I remember that at the last conference I attended, SXSW Interactive, the keynotes by Ray …

Day 0 of the MySQL Conference was a day unlike any other day. It was, in fact, tutorial day. While regular days of the Percona Live MySQL Conference feature 50 minute sessions, usually split into a 40 minute talk and a 5-10 minute question period, tutorials are 3-hour-long sessions (with a generous 10 minute break in the middle for those that wish to go to the WC) that provide an in-depth dive into some aspect of MySQL. Due to the length of the tutorials, they are more in-depth and technical than individual sessions can be, but at the same time, we are limited to 2 tutorials slots per day instead of the 5 for sessions.The tutorial schedule for the conference is located here, and with so many good ones, it was hard to choose which one(s) to go to.For the morning session, I attended Peter Zaitev’s tutorial entitled “InnoDB and XtraDB …

A panel on “Future Perfect: The Road Ahead for MySQL“, by Brian Aker (HP), Paul Mikesell (Clustrix), Sundar Raghavan (Amazon), Slavik Markovich (McAffee), and Ori Hernstadt (Akiban).

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

There was an interesting distinction between the mindset of Oracle and of MySQL made by 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 …

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

The first keynote speech was by Peter Zaitsev, founder of Percona and a very smart guy, and by Baron Schwartz (Percona), another very smart guy, the brain 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 – the 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: He talked about his own personal journey from closed-source, proprietory to open-source, and the …

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:

In case you live under a rock, the MySQL conference starts on Tuesday. There are 8 concurrent tracks of content. Aside from my own talks, here are the sessions I would most like to see.

On Tuesday:

• Tutorial: Innodb and XtraDB Architecture and Performance Optimization. Peter’s talks are always great, and this is a perennial favorite. If you have never been, you should go to this one. You will realize how little you really know about InnoDB/XtraDB, and how much it matters.
• Tutorial: …

This week we give an overview of Percona Live and what we think are the highlights, including which sessions we recommend for beginners and which we cannot wait to see for ourselves.

On Tuesday June 5th, 2012, a MySQL Innovation Day is being hosted at Oracle’s Conference Center in Redwood Shores, California. The MySQL Innovation day will feature multiple “lightning” talks by Oracle’s MySQL Engineers, If you cannot make it out to California, the lightning talks will be available via a live webcast, too - so either way, save the date! Unfortunately there's no link yet.

MariaDB 5.5 beta announcement

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We’re running Birds of a Feather (BoF) sessions and lightning talks this year at the MySQL conference, similarly to previous years. You can help by submitting proposals ASAP. The deadline is Monday, and it is a hard deadline.

Submit a BoF Session • Submit a Lightning Talk

Why is this a big deal? Why the hard deadline? It turns out that this is one of the things I always underestimated. Planning for these is actually quite difficult and they are very expensive. That’s because we have to ensure that there is room for them to take place, doors are unlocked, and the lights are turned on. This really surprised me — I always thought it was simple to let people gather together in the evening. Well, nothing is simple at …

This year, I have the pleasure of returning to the MySQL Conference & Expo as a speaker. Percona have picked up the torch that O’Reilly had held as the conference organizers, and they’re putting together a 3-day conference this year. I am co-presenting a tutorial with Yves Trudeau from Percona.

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Want a free copy of High Performance MySQL, Third Edition? If you register before the early-bird pricing expires for the MySQL Conference in April, and use the discount code PL-Book, you’ll get to take a free copy home from the conference!

And now, a status update: I’m currently proofing the QC2 (quality control #2) revision of the book; after this, the book goes to manufacturing. The PDF is now 820 pages, which is a lot of work to proofread. You can imagine how much more in-depth we’ve been able to go with so many more pages.

The free sample online is …