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.

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.

An annual tradition of the upcoming MySQL user conference is the awards ceremony. Last year we introduced the opportunity for everyone in the community to nominate candidates and this was a big success. Now is the time to start nominating deserving winners for the awards for 2012, in the 3 categories named below.

The winners will be selected by a community panel (see below) and winners will be announced on Wednesday, April 11th at the Santa Clara Convention Center, as part of the evening Community Reception.

How:

Please send in your suggestions for deserving winners
to: mysql.awards [at] gmail.com
no later than: 23:59 Sunday February 29th (Pacific time)

Usually people do this around New Year, I will do it in February. Actually, I was inspired to do this after reviewing all the talks for this year's MySQL Conference - what a snapshot into the state of where we are! It made me realize we've made important progress in the past year, worth taking a moment to celebrate it. So here we go...

Diversification

In the past few years there was a lot of fear and doubt about MySQL due to Oracle taking over the ownership. But if you ask me, I was more worried for MySQL because of MySQL itself. I've often said that if MySQL had been a healthy open source project - like the other 3 components in the LAMP stack - then most of the NoSQL technologies we've seen come about would never have been started as their own projects, because it would have been more natural to build those needs on top of MySQL. You could have had a key-value store (HandlerSocket, Memcache API...), sharding (Spider) and clustering (Galera). You could have had a graph storage engine (OQGraph engine isn't quite it, I understand it is internally an InnoDB table still?). There could even have been MapReduce functionality, although I do think the Hadoop ecosystem targets problems that actually are better solved without MySQL.

The program for this year's MySQL conference is now published.

As regular readers will remember, I served on the program committee this year and was one of those who appealed for people to send in great proposals. I would now like to thank all of you that sent in proposals. On my quick count we had over 250 proposals, and if I look at my own ratings I'd say about 180 of them were really good, conference worthy talks (and this already excludes some pretty good talks). A related piece of trivia was that this might have been the first year ever that the deadline for the Call for Proposals wasn't extended, which possibly took some of you by surprise. We simply got so many good talks by the deadline, that there wasn't any need to.

Just wanted to say I'm so happy: https://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2012/01/09/announcement-of-percona…

And also that this is a significant moment in the evolution of MySQL - things will never be the same again.

A year ago I posted a blog on The state of MySQL forks: co-operating without co-operating. (Also Giuseppe wrote about the topic at that time, and Peter Zaitsev covers it in his conference keynotes.) So I've been wondering if it would be good to write an update on the topic now, and in that case what to write.

There's now 2 weeks left of the Call for Papers for Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo (Santa Clara, CA). This weekend I've been finalizing my abstracts for submission and I trust many of you are doing the same. (If nothing else, do it for the free entrance! Or because you're passionate about MySQL, yeah, that's what I meant...)

This is the main annual MySQL event, so I thought it is worth the bandwidth to use these two weeks for some discussion and brainstorming. We are the MySQL community, it's up to us to make this a great conference now! This year I'm on the program committee, so I'm looking forward to reviewing many, many great proposals. At the same time, I'm interested to hear what you, dear readers - and hopefully future conference visitors - are interested in seeing at the conference? I'll share my ideas here and you can share yours in the comments or if you prefer you can email me at henrik.ingo [at] avoinelama.fi.

Here are the slides to my second talk at last week's Percona Live event in London:

Here are the slides to my first talk at Percona Live UK 2011: Choosing a MySQL High Availability solution.1

• 1See this for a review of the conference as a whole: https://openlife.cc/blogs/2011/october/thanks-percona-and-attendees-gre…]