This is the second and final part of my notes from the MySQL conference. In this part I'll focus on the technical substance of talks I saw, and didn't see.

More than ever before I was a contributor rather than attendee at this conference. Looking back, this resulted in seeing less talks than I would have wanted to, since I was speaking or preparing to speak myself. Sometimes it was worse than speaking, for instance I spent half a day picking up pewter goblets from an egnravings shop... (congratulations to all the winners again :-) Luckily, I can make up for some of that by going back and browse their slides. This is especially important whenever 2 good talks are scheduled in the same slot, or in the same slot when I was to speak. So I have categorized topics here along various axes, but also along the "things I did see" versus "things I missed" axis.

My own talks

Tutorial: Evaluating MySQL High Availability alternatives
Using and Benchmarking Galera in Different Architectures

I have finally recovered from my trip to Santa Clara enough that I can scribble down some notes from this year's MySQL Conference. Writing a travel report is part of the deal where my employer covers the travel expense, so even if many people have written about the conference, I need to do it too. And judging from the many posts for instance from Pythian's direction, Nokia is perhaps not the only company with such a policy?

Baron's keynote

There has usually always been something that can be called a "soft keynote". Pirate Party founder Rick Falckvinge speaking at a database conference is a memorable example (I still keep in touch with him, having met him at the Hyatt Santa Clara). This year there was one less day, and therefore less keynotes. The soft keynote was therefore taken care of by Baron using some time out of Peter's opening keynote. Baron's talk was an ode to the conference itself, underscoring the meaning of the conference beyond just learning about technology. Sharing his own journey from a numb ASP.NET coder ("a good day at the office was when I changed a table based layout to pure CSS ...but nobody else seemed to care.") to his role today, he challenged people to network, make new friends and new revolutionary ideas. To me, it was a great opening keynote (and quite obviously would have made less sense on the last day of the conference). The talk, including Peter's part, is available on Percona.TV.

Winners of the 2012 MySQL Community Awards were announced at the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo just a few hours ago:

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In terms of continuing with MySQL traditions, it has been my privilege the past years to be the secretary of the MySQL Community Awards panel. We have so many amazing persons, products and companies in this community. One of the nicest thing we can do to each other, and what really builds and fuels a community, is to show appreciation and say thanks to people that really deserve it.

Attached are slides and a excercise spreadsheet for the How to evaluate which MySQL High Availability solution best suits you tutorial.

We will use the spreadsheet after the break, please download it now.

So yesterday I introduced the newly committed HTTP JSON key-value interface in Drizzle. The next step of course is to create some simple application that would use this to store data, this serves both as an example use case as well as for myself to get the feeling for whether this makes sense as a programming paradigm.

Personally, I have been a fan of the schemaless key-value approach ever since I graduated university and started doing projects with dozens of tables and hundreds of columns in total. Especially in small projects I always found the array structures in languages like PHP and Perl and Python to be very flexible to develop with. As I was developing and realized I need a new variable or new data field somewhere, it was straightforward to just toss a new key-value into the array and continue with writing code. No need to go back and edit some class definition. If I ever needed to find out what is available in some struct, I could always do dump_var($obj) to find out. Even large projects like Drupal get along with this model very well.

There will be a book signing opportunity at the MySQL User Conference, more precisely at the Expo Hall Community Reception on Wednesday evening. You will be able to meet and talk to authors of great MySQL related books. ...and myself.

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.

Alex Yurchenko finally posted results on a benchmark he has planned to do for a long time: Galera vs NDB cloud shootout.

Their blog requires registration to comment, so I'll post my comment here instead:

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Sysbench can do the loadbalancing itself, so there is no need for external loadbalancer. Just add a comma separated list of master MySQL nodes to --mysql-host. This is similar to what the JDBC and PHP drivers can do too, and it is my favorite architecture. Why introduce extra layers of stuff that you don't need and that doesn't bring any additional value?

Earlier today I posted a Drizzle white paper we've been working on: Drizzle and IPv6.

With apologies to Planet MySQL readers. This post is about MySQL, but it is not technical, and probably not at all interesting to many of my usual readers. But it didn't fit in a tweet...

The Open Invention Network announced that its members have agreed to broaden the scope of the "protection" that it offers its members against software patent attacks against "The Linux System". Simon Phipps, a former Sun collague whom I follow on Twitter, covered the OIN in a very informative InfoWorld piece: