It was in doubt but today it was confirmed that I'll be in Santa Clara in April for the MySQL conference hosted by Percona. This will be my 4th Percona conference and I'm delighted to be attending again. The Percona guys put on a great conference, nobody can deny them that. Although I'm not speaking at this year's conference, my esteemed colleagues will be. The recently awarded Oracle Ace for MySQL, Marco Tusa, Danil Zburivsky, Francisco Bordenave and Ben Mildren will be delivering talks and I'm thrilled that Pythian founder, Paul Vallée is also going to be in town to talk about how Pythian are driving down human error. 

I did submit some papers as I was eager to talk at this year's conference. By my own error I submitted some community flavour papers which were not selected for delivery at the conference. I was dis-heartened for a while and began to convince myself that it didn't matter if I miss Percona Live 2013. I planned to get back to the drawing board and produce some killer-prose for the next cfp. I had all but resigned to the fact PL2013 was off. I decided was going to re-focus my annual budget for other extra-curricular activities; maybe on something other then conference. Then it rained down reasons for me to attend, in fact it felt like monsoon season. There was a force unbeknown to me at work. As I stood in my kitchen, washing the dishes and listening to episode 129 of the OurSQL podcast (because that's how I roll) it was entirely about Percona Live; it hit me that I couldn't stave off this year. Shlomi Noach featured in the discussion about the plethora of great topics in the schedule for the week. It was too much, I couldn't handle it. I couldn't listen to the whole show (sorry Sheeri & Gerry!). All of these ideas/events/facts made it impossible for me to abstain from the transatlantic trip in the name of database geekery. 

• I won a conference pass from Shlomi Noach's blog (thank you, Shlomi)
• 2013 conference is a day longer then 2012 - that's great value!
• SO many potentially great talks and tutorials (too many for 1 person to attend)
• Oracle announced the GA release of 5.6
• Pythian are sponsors of the event, something that we all wanted in 2012
• Oracle announce that they are attending and talking!
• Colleagues I've worked with everyday but have never shared a beer with are attending
• Ex-colleagues and clients will also be in attendance 

It's an expensive feat to travel to the States for the week, however after entering openark's competition for a ticket to the conference, I was afforded my pass and a catalyst to organise the trip. I spoke with Marco after Shlomi had announced I had won and he re-enforced that it was an important conference to attend. I couldn't disagree with this guy, after all he's usually right ;-) 
As one of the only Pythian-ites not speaking at the event I've promised my team-lead to keep the rest of the team updated, so expect some tweets and blog posts through out the conference. 
So maybe it's destiny, maybe it's just the strong magnetism of MySQL and it's ecosystem but I'm looking forward to the week and seeing all of the great people that make it what it is, both organisers and attendees. 
See you all in approximately a month. Don't forget Pedro's on Tuesday evening for the MySQL community dinner some food and a great chance to mingle with the MySQL community. Download common schema if you didn't already, it's a really great project and if you're attending the conference be sure to attend Shlomi's talk for more info about QueryScript.
See you in April!