To round off my memoirs from the MySQL conference 2011, I'll just write down for the historical record my own activities.

MySQL awards

With the community picking up tasks that used to be handled by MySQL AB, it somehow has fallen on my lap to drive the selection of winners for the annual MySQL awards. This was the second year we did it and we have settled on a format where the winners are chosen by a community panel consisting of 2 previous years winners, plus the conference chair(s). I think having the community nominating and voting the winners have brought forward some truly deserving and sometimes also surprising winners, and it has been a pleasure to be involved in this process. I feel privileged to be part of a process channeling so much goodwill and respect from the MySQL community to the winners.

This year's winners were already published here previously.

Xtrabackup Manager BoF

Together with Lachlan we did a BoF on Xtrabackup Manager. There was a good group of people turning up. I didn't write down the name, but someone offered to participate by creating a browser based user interface, which XBM doesn't have yet. Peter Zaitsev stopped by for a word of encouragement even if he was also going to another BoF at the same time.

Friendly and without drama

That's a good way to summarize the MySQL conference 2011. Nobody acquired nobody. There were no volcanoes keeping men away from their wives, dads away from soon to be born babies. I had packed extra underwear just in case, but it wasn't needed.

This was the first time I attended the MySQL conference as an end user of MySQL, rather than selling something to someone. It gave a different perspective as I was mostly interested in learning how to solve my own problems, rather than someone else's problems. The conference catered to that need very well!

Below, links are generally to the O'Reilly page that contains a PDF or PPT file of the slides. Keynote and Ignite talks contain video. The 2 first ones are the most important and will already take you a long way in becoming a MySQL ninja!

MySQL administration, tuning and architecture

Confuse of Dev or Ops? Simple rule: if you are praise for Web site success, you are Dev; if you are blame when Web site down, you are Ops.

This year was the first year the public could nominate candidates for these awards. We got in many nominations and this really helped the panel to get an overview of everything that is noteworthy in the MySQL ecosystem right now. Thank you to everyone who participated by sending in nominations.

In the first category the panel received and debated over a dozen suggestions. There are so many great people in this community, it is easy to think of people who truly deserve to be awarded. There were however two persons who clearly stood out with a track record of years and years of broad and really key contributions to the MySQL community. These two persons also clearly stood out both in number of nominations and number of votes. Therefore, the...

It's now 2 hours until I depart for San Francisco and then Santa Clara for this year's MySQL Conference. Can't wait to meet everyone and to learn about cool new things (2 solutions for parallelizing replication, Drizzle, Xtrabackup...)

This year I am involved in two BoF sessions: Severalnines ClusterControl with Johan Anderson and Xtrabackup Manager with Lachlan Mulcahy. Both of these are about brand new topics, this being the first time they are presented, so I'm excited to be working with these guys.

Jonathan Levin has an excellent blog post titled How to make MySQL cool again. It is almost word for word something I've wanted to write for a long time. Now I don't need to, thanks Jonathan.

Once again Blogger failed to post my comments to his site, so I will make some comments as a new post of my own instead. Jonathan actually lists things that exist already but isn't getting used enough. My list contains also a few things that I don't know if they exist or not.

Hi Jonathan

This is just a friendly reminder that you can nominate your favorite MySQL community member, application and company for the traditional awards. The nominations must be in by the end of this week, after which the panel votes on them:

https://openlife.cc/blogs/2011/march/call-nominations-2011-oreilly-mysq…

I've seen at least a few people on IRC that were thinking of sending in nominations, now is a good time to do it!

The address is mysql.awards [at] gmail.com

There has been an increase in the discussion about MySQL replication and how to make it happen faster. I don't think Marco Tusa's blog is on Planet MySQL, so let's highlight it first: A dream on MySQL parallel replication. This is a good account of what it looks like out in the field of MySQL databases today - you are increasingly aware of replication, fearing it will be a bottleneck you cannot fix.