Xaprb

I’ll be attending the 2008 MySQL Conference and Expo again this year, and I’m looking forward to hearing some great sessions, meeting new and old friends, and giving sessions myself. As a proposal reviewer, I looked at and voted on 250+ proposals for sessions and tutorials for this conference. There are going to be some great sessions and tutorials.^[1]

If you haven’t come to the conference previously, it’s well worth your time and money, in my opinion.

I (Baron Schwartz) am giving two sessions myself, on extremely practical topics. One is the query cache, and the other is EXPLAIN. Both are the subject of many myths and misunderstandings! My goal is to remove all the programmer-speak and show you how they really work. Once you understand that, you can understand the technical terminology. (But it’s very hard to go the other direction).

I haven’t decided yet which sessions I want to attend, but I know this: I’m not going to miss seeing how Beat Vontobel solves a Su Doku puzzle with only self-joins. His session on views last year was just amazing.

Hopefully there’ll be plenty of time to sit down for meals and chats with all the people I correspond with throughout the year, but rarely get to see or talk to!

¹And no, I don’t get any kickback for saying nice things about the conference. Even reviewing all those proposals was a volunteer job. And Jay Pipes tricked me into it, the rat! He told me it would be only a few hours. Haha, you can’t review 250 proposals in a few hours… I have to say though, some of them were really rewarding to read. One of them was about holding a cosmic prayer circle or something like that. Without expressing any opinion on my religion/spirituality, I did have to vote NO on that one — sorry, wrong conference.