MySQL Connect is approaching and I started making note of the sessions I am going to want to attend. There are 77 great sessions and the following ten caught my interest. Hopefully I will see you in some of the following:

1. BOF8978 – MySQL Cluster: From Zero to One Billion in Five Easy Steps

   Bernhard Ocklin – Director MySQL Cluster, Oracle
   Andrew Morgan – MySQL Senior Product Manager, Oracle
   Matthew Keep – MySQL Product Manager, Oracle

   Of course it takes more than five steps to scale to more than one billion queries per minute, but the new configuration features of MySQL Cluster make it much simpler to provision and deploy MySQL Cluster on-premises or in the cloud, automatically optimized for your target use case. This BoF session is designed to give you a demo of the new features, showing how you can use them to quickly build your own proof of concept and then take that into production. The MySQL Cluster Engineering team will be on hand to answer your questions and also listen to the requirements you have for current or future MySQL Cluster projects.

2. CON8862 – Big Data Is a Big Scam (Most of the Time)

   Daniel Austin – Chief Architect, PayPal, Inc.

   This session challenges the conventional wisdom and tries to dispel some of the myths about big data, NoSQL, and everything. When do you need a NoSQL system? How do you choose one from another amid the hype? And how do you know when to stick to your RDBMS and resist becoming a follower of big data fashion? Come and hear what you need to know about your options and how to make wise decisions about solutions to your big data problems.

3. CON9310 – Solving the Challenges of Big Databases with MySQL

   Bradley Kuszmaul – Chief Architect, MIT

   When you’re using MySQL for big data (more than ten times as large as main memory), these challenges often arise: loading data fast; maintaining indexes under insertions deletions, and updates; adding and removing columns online; adding indexes online; preventing slave lag; and compressing data effectively. This session shows why some of these challenges are difficult to solve with storage engines based on B-trees, how Fractal Tree data structures work, and why they can help solve these problems. Tokutek sells a transaction-safe Fractal Tree storage engine for MySQL, but the presentation is primarily about the underlying technology. It includes a discussion of both the theoretical and practical aspects of Fractal Tree indexes.

4. CON9261 – MySQL and Solid-State Drives: Usage and Tuning

   VADYM TKACHENKO – , Percona Inc

   This presentation covers
   • Solid-state drive (SSD) internals and how they affect database performance
   • I/O-level benchmarks for SATA (Intel 320 SSD) and PCI-e (FusionIO, Virident) cards
   • Absolute performance and performance per dollar
   • How you can use Percona Server and MySQL with SSD
   • What tuning parameters are most important and what performance can be expected in real production use

5. CON8562 – Powerful EXPLAIN in MySQL 5.6

   Evgeny Potemkin – Senior Software Engineer, Oracle

   The EXPLAIN command of MySQL has long been a very useful tool for understanding how MySQL will execute a query. Release 5.6 of the MySQL database offers several new additions that give more-detailed information about the query plan and make it easier to understand at the same time. This presentation gives an overview of new EXPLAIN features: structured EXPLAIN in JSON format, EXPLAIN for INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE, and optimizer trace. Examples in the session give insights into how you can take advantage of the new features. They show how these features supplement and relate to each other and to classical EXPLAIN and how and why the MySQL server chooses a particular query plan.

6. CON8618 – Rick’s RoTs (Rules of Thumb)

   Rick James – MySQL Geek, Yahoo! Inc

   What to tune? How much faster will it be? What about … This session presents a fast-paced list of rules of thumb, optimization tips, schema design advice, and more. It is aimed at MySQL developers and DBAs—from novice to expert.

7. CON8875 – MySQL and Hadoop

   Chris Schneider – Sr. MySQL Architect, Ning.com

   Everyone knows that big data is here to stay, and one of the best NoSQL solutions out there is Hadoop. MySQL DBAs will need to know when to adjust and leverage Hadoop within their environment and even start using and administering Hadoop clusters. Hadoop is no replacement for the time-tested RDBMS, but for dealing with petabytes of data, Hadoop is the coolest kid on the block. In this session, you will learn
   1. What Hadoop is and how to leverage it as a DBA
   2. What the difference is between Hadoop and relational database management systems
   3. How to import and export data from MySQL to Hadoop and vice versa
   4. How to use SQL to run analytics within Hadoop

8. CON8931 – Scaling Pinterest

   Yashwanth Nelapati – ,
   Marty Weiner – , Pinterest

   Pinterest.com has grown to billions of page views per month in just under a year, and the #1 question it’s asked at parties is, “What’s in your stack?” Sit back while Pinterest takes you on a tour of its current architecture, the lessons learned along the way, what worked, and what didn’t. It focuses on how things changed as it grew, how it sharded its MySQL database, caching mechanisms, and server management. The presentation also touches on the conveniences and challenges of building today’s most modern Web infrastructures on Amazon’s EC2.

9. CON9357 – Durability Is Key: How to Protect Your Data from Corruption

   Grant McAlister – Senior Principal Engineer, Amazon.com

   The last thing you want to see as a DBA is a database failing to start or a query failing to complete due to corruption. This session describes the differences between logical and physical corruption in MySQL and shows how to best protect your MySQL database from both types of corruption. It also covers how to detect whether you have corruption in your database and how to recover from it. In addition, the session shows how running MySQL in the cloud makes this protection, detection, and recovery easier.

10. HOL10474 – MySQL Security: Authentication and Audit

    Jonathon Coombes – Principal MySQL Support Engineer, Oracle

    This hands-on lab • Starts with an introduction to the authentication plug-in API and how it works • Tries an example HTTP authentication plug-in • Sets up an Oracle Pluggable Authentication Module (PAM) plug-in to access the server OS user definitions • Walks through the MySQL audit plug-in API and how it works • Experiments with the Oracle audit log plug-in and various events it can log Finally, the participants will build and play with their own plug-in that forwards MySQL events to the OS logging APIs (syslogd on Linux and Windows Event Log on Windows).

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