I actually don’t remember exactly whether it was in 2006, 2007 or 2008 — but around that time the MySQL community had one of the greatest MySQL conferences put on by O’Reilly and MySQL. It was a good, stable, predictable time.

Shortly thereafter, the MySQL world saw acquisitions, forks, times of uncertainly, more acquisitions, more forks, rumors (“Oracle is going to kill MySQL and the whole Internet”) and just a lot of drama and politics.

And now, after all this time some 6 or 7 years later, it feels like a MySQL Renaissance. All of the major MySQL players are coming to the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo 2013. I am happy to see Oracle’s engineers coming with talks — and now with a great MySQL 5.6 release — and I have great confidence in MySQL’s future with Oracle’s commitment level, coupled with the fact that Percona Server and MariaDB are continuing to mature.

For this year’s conference I am going to give a tutorial titled, “Percona XtraBackup: Old and New Features.” I actually traded my other talk, “MySQL 5.6 improvements from InnoDB internals prospective,” with Oracle’s Sunny Bains and his talk, MySQL 5.6: What’s New in InnoDB. Sunny honestly knows more about InnoDB internals than I do.

There are going to be a lot of great talks, and I would have a hard time listing all of the ones on my list to attend — but you can check all of them out for yourself. But I will say that the greatest part of the conference is not talks, but what happens in between them — in the conference center halls and behind the curtains.

If you are lucky you can grab engineers from Facebook, Twitter, Google, Box, Esty, Pinterest, Tumblr, NING.com… and ask them any question and actually get an answer. You can even catch interesting rumors… and spread some of your own. Basically just be part of the MySQL crowd and really feel the great vibe (especially after a few drinks during the Community Networking Reception).

I am personally looking forward to another lengthy discussion with Dimitri Kravtchuk on how benchmarks should be run, what the next bottleneck in MySQL will be, and how we, with Percona Server, are going to beat MySQL in performance. And you can actually go and ask Sunny anything about InnoDB internals: He is one of the few engineers in the world who knows everything about InnoDB.

If you seriously work with MySQL, then you should not miss the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo 2013. It runs April 22-25 in Santa Clara, California. But just remember: Advanced Rate tickets end on March 24th, so make sure you register this week.

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