I wish I could be at the Hotsos Symposium. I would keep my mouth very tightly closed and my ears wide open, and try to learn from people who are completely out of my league about performance analysis topics I won’t grok for another decade (if I’m lucky). But I just can’t cram in that much travel.

If you’re like me, why don’t you go to the O’Reilly MySQL Conference instead? I’ll be trying my feeble best to bring some of the Oracle performance scientist’s mentality to this event, with presentations such as my Forecasting MySQL Performance and Scalability session. And a lot of smart people will be there from many …

OmniTI’s Surge conference is looking really good — and I’m going to be speaking there. The CfP just closed, so the list of speakers is still growing, but it already includes impressive names such as Neil J. Gunther. So far, this speaker list has zero fluff, and reminds me of the Percona Performance Conference. I’ll be talking about how not to shard your systems. Sharding is no fun and it’s costly. If you don’t have to do it — and many applications don’t need to, with orders-of-magnitude performance improvements in MySQL — you should not.

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Forecasting Oracle Performance

Forecasting Oracle Performance. By Craig Shallahamer, Apress 2007. Page count: about 250 pages. (Here’s a link to the publisher’s site). Short version: buy it and read it, but make sure you don’t rely on it alone; deepen your knowledge through other sources.

I bought and read this book because I’m interested in performance, performance forecasting, and capacity planning. I’m not interested in forecasting Oracle performance per se. However, I have noticed that there is a lot of good literature in the Oracle arena that can apply to other databases (*cough* …