Oh boy, I'm starting to feel the stress of having to prepare a little bit of this and a little bit of that for the upcoming MySQL User Conference (Santa Clara, April 10 to 13). But I wanted to also jump on this meme and list a few sessions I definitively want to attend:

I'm speaking, so I suppose I need to attend:

• How to evaluate which MySQL High Availability solution best suits you. This 3 hour tutorial I'm co-presenting with Ben Mildren, a former Nokia collague who now works with Pythian.
• Using and benchmarking Galera in different architectures Co-presented with Alex Yurchenko of Codership, the creators of Galera.
• Drizzle Day

Ok, now we got that out of the way. So what themes am I really interested beyond my own talks?

Devops is a big trend and it is a bit tricky for databases as it includes more than just scripting rpm --install. Unfortunately I don't see the ones I was hoping for in the schedule grid yet, but this one is kind of relevant to devops (and cool in its own right):

• Scaling MySQL in the Cloud by Sebastian Stadil. Scalr.net does both deployment and automatic scale-out / scale-in of MySQL and the entire LAMP stack.

Enterprise

When I was selling MySQL I really got most satisfaction of the projects that were migrating from a proprietary (can I say "legacy"?) database to MySQL across the organization. This really accelerated in 2008 when the downturn forced IT departments to look at cost savings. Then it came to a clear pause when Oracle bought Sun, I mean what's the point of migrating from one Oracle product to another? But in the past 2 years I've really seen this catch up again, as people realized MySQL has a bright future after all. (Also, it joys me to see PostgreSQL getting its fair share of such migrations too, but that is off topic for this conference.)

So if you thought MySQL is just for the web, or can only do read-only workloads, think again. Go and see these excellent talks for MySQL in enterprise use:

• Migrating A Financial Services Application from Sybase to MySQL
• Building a High-Volume Reporting System on Amazon using MySQL, Tungsten, and Vertica
• Architecting your IT for long term cost savings with MySQL

...I'm especially interested in the last one, by Kaj Arnö from SkySQL. It's not just the topic itself but as SkySQL has become something of a supermarket of MySQL solutions, it will be interesting to see if some solutions get more emphasis than others and what the emphasis of open source vs closed source solutions will be. Above all I hope he will share some actual customer case studies, I know SkySQL has many of them. (In fact, there is a separate talk from SkySQL about scaling JetAir.)

In fact, there is a whole 1 day track with such business oriented topics, and chances are I'll just sit there the whole day, but I wanted to list the above 3 as particularly interesting.

There are a few good talks of technologies close to my heart:

• A Global In-memory Data System for MySQL, a MySQL Cluster talk and comparison against some NoSQL alternatives.
• Introducing XtraBackup Manager
• Getting started with Drizzle 7.1
• Scripting MySQL with Lua and libdrizzle inside Nginx

I have high expectations for the talk from Daniel. He has spent the last 9 months seriously improving the state of Drizzle documentation. (I've helped a little.) Yesterday he finally finished a thorough chapter on the Drizzle replication (which is completely redesigned compared to MySQL). From a work perspective I'm interested in Drizzle's ability to feed transaction events directly to a message queue (RabbitMQ and ZeroMQ) instead of another Drizzle database. With increasingly complex data architectures and need to update data in real time across all systems, I believe this kind of approach will eventually replace traditional ETL that goes into the database and scans for recent changes.

The last talk is from a company that uses the asynchronous API in libdrizzle. This is not a high priority for me personally but I know it is very trendy thing to do (see Node.js) and I look forward to listen to the talk. It is also a good example of cross-pollination between MySQL forks, as they use the libdrizzle client library against a vanilla MySQL.

The conference is packed with great talks and I'm sure it will be difficult to choose, but these are a few high level topics I intend to focus on.