The Winter season for conferences is catching up speed.

DOAG

As I write this the DOAG conference in Germany is happening. It is one of the biggest (or the biggest?) Oracle user group conferences outside of USA. Many of my European friends in the MySQL space are talking there. As you know I have been a big fan of Galera Cluster for MySQL for over a year now, but I was perhaps a bit of an early adopter. Lo-and-behold, I was surprised to see the DOAG related press-release from SkySQL puts the creators of Galera first in their headline: Codership, SkySQL und weitere Top-Experten rund um das Thema ‘MySQL Datenbanken” in Nürnberg versammelt. Talk about crossing the chasm! Ralf Gebhardt, my other mentor from MySQL AB times, is speaking on MySQL HA solutions. Seppo, Erkan and Oli and people from Oracle are talking too.

Percona Live UK, Dec 2-3

Percona Live UK 2013 (London, Dec 2-3) is just around the corner. This is the main European MySQL conference of the year. If you work with MySQL somehow, it is well worth attending. In fact, last year's conference was probably the best MySQL conference I've ever attended anywhere, not just Europe. It was just densely packed with high quality MySQL content.

I will present 2 talks in London:

Introducing XtraBackup Manager

- This is a re-run of the same talk given by Lachlan Mulcahy in Santa Clara last Spring. I usually don't do demos (I usually talk about clustering and usually networks don't work at conferences) but for this one I will try to set one up.

Using and Benchmarking Galera in different Architectures

- This too is a re-run of my own talk in Santa Clara last Spring. How great is this: I get to make two talks and all the slides are already done!

If you are not so familiar with Galera yet, you should also consider the earlier Galera Cluster best Practices talk by Seppo Jaakola, which is more of an introduction. Or for that matter, go for the 3 hour Galera tutorial by LeFred. With that info you'll be better equipped for my talk on different Galera architectures.

I should also mention my former colleagues from Nokia, now representing Pythian and the host nation England, Ben and Andy will be presenting Replication features, technologies and 3rd party Extinction. ...which seems to be loosely based on the tutorial I did together with Ben in Santa Clara. Good job guys, taking that show on the road all on your own!

Last year Percona did the best conference I ever seen, this year they are offering the best discount I ever saw: if you go and register now with the code Come2mytalk, you get 40% off the registration price. Good way to spend what is left of your 2012 budgets!

Percona Live Santa Clara 2013

We don't have long to go for the main MySQL conference in the world: Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo 2013.

The tutorials have already been selected. Worth noting that out of 48 hours tutorials, 21 hours cover some form of high availability, and an additional 3 cover MySQL in Amazon cloud.

I will be presenting, again, the tutorial Evaluating MySQL High Availability Alternatives. I have to say I am a bit proud that this tutorial was selected. I presented it last Spring too (together with Ben) and I wasn't sure if the committee would select it for a second time. There are some really good tutorials that get reruns, from speakers like Peter on InnoDB, or Yoshinori on Linux and HW tuning. So I will now have to do my best to live up to their standards.

For sure, there's new stuff to cover in this area, with MySQL 5.6 coming out with many replication related enhancements, and MariaDB 10.0 multi-source replication is really interesting, something that was until now only available to Tungsten users. So if you want a to start the conference week with an overview of all the HA alternatives out there (and then attend a plethora of talks on each of the ones you find interesting), you should register for my tutorial.

Fosdem

Fosdem (Brussels) is one of the largest open source conferences in the world. Call for Papers is currently open both for the main track, as well as MySQL, PostgreSQL and NoSQL tracks.