Xaprb

Here is a collection of upcoming events that are interesting to me as a MySQL user (in some cases because I’m speaking). I think some of them are must-see events. I am sure I am missing a lot of events, but some of these are only publicized in specific channels, and I wanted to mention them here to help spread the word.

Upcoming Meetups

This coming Thursday, Charlottesville’s Neon Guild tech group will co-host a Meetup with a noted Kanban expert.

I’m joining two Meetups soon to talk about building database (MySQL) applications with the Go programming language:

• Wednesday, March 13, 2013 in Charlottesville Virginia
• Tuesday, March 19, 2013 in Alexandria, Virginia

Upcoming Conferences

• Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo 2013 in Santa Clara, CA April 22-25, 2013. This is the annual MySQL conference. I’m not speaking this year, but…
• Velocity Web Performance And Operations Conference June 18-20, Santa Clara, CA. This is an amazing event that brings together the best and brightest people who are building the future of the Internet. I am speaking on quantifying system normality.

Upcoming Call For Proposals

• OmniTI Surge, Maryland, Sep 12-13. CfP closes May 1st.
• Velocity New York 2013 Call for Participation (Oct 14-16). Proposals Due Apr 29th.

I’m really looking forward to this year’s Percona Live MySQL Conference. This is always THE event of the year for me in the MySQL conference circuit. It’s also the first year I haven’t been a speaker! I’ve been a speaker since 2007 but this year things were too uncertain for me to submit a proposal in time.

As usual, the real highlight of the conference is seeing and talking to everyone. Technical sessions are also great, but honestly I can usually study up on technical things without going to a conference. However, nothing can replace the benefit of meeting all the dedicated MySQL community members in the hallways and at meals, and talking to MySQL-related businesses in the expo hall. Year after year, this conference has been what makes things happen: technical innovations, product launches, business initiatives, career changes, you name it — pretty much everything important in my personal career and business experience has started at this conference. The reason is the people. There is no other conference that gathers together such a large and diverse audience. This year I’ll also be looking forward to it for another reason: I’m not at Percona anymore, so this will probably be my only chance to visit with a lot of my former coworkers. I miss you guys!

There are 4 full days of 7 concurrent tutorials and sessions with world-famous speakers, and you can only be in one place at a time. It’s a great problem to have. Here is a selection of a few of my favorite sessions:

• Galera Cluster Best Practices
• Engine-independent persistent statistics with histograms in MariaDB
• Tracking Page Changes for Your Database and Bitmap Backups
• State of the Art for MySQL Multi-Master Replication
• Using MySQL Performance Schema to debug performance issues

With over 100 sessions to choose from, picking just a few as my favorites is kind of silly, but hopefully this gives you a sense of the flavor of this event. Actually, looking through the program has reminded me that this conference isn’t just the best MySQL conference around. It’s a great conference, period. I am hard-pressed to think of another conference I’ve ever attended with such an impressive schedule. Great job Percona, speakers, and conference committee!

If you haven’t made plans to attend this conference, please take a few minutes and browse the tutorial and session (day 2, 3) schedule. Now tell your boss you need to go, and get hustling on your registration, airfare, and hotel so you can get the best bookings and discounts. As always, I hope to see you there!

In case you live under a rock, the MySQL conference starts on Tuesday. There are 8 concurrent tracks of content. Aside from my own talks, here are the sessions I would most like to see.

On Tuesday:

• Tutorial: Innodb and XtraDB Architecture and Performance Optimization. Peter’s talks are always great, and this is a perennial favorite. If you have never been, you should go to this one. You will realize how little you really know about InnoDB/XtraDB, and how much it matters.
• Tutorial: Linux and H/W optimizations for MySQL. Last year I tweeted that Yoshinori’s tutorial was the 3rd edition of High Performance MySQL, and I really wasn’t exaggerating that much.
• BoF session: Percona XtraDB Cluster. I believe that this is one of the few truly groundbreaking changes to MySQL — right up there with “MySQL has transactions now” and “MySQL adds replication.”

On Wednesday:

• MySQL Plugins – why should I bother? Sergei is the co-author of a book on plugins. Their power is not to be underestimated.
• Getting InnoDB Compression Ready for Facebook Scale. Compression is very powerful — if we can just get the implementation to work better. Facebook, apparently, has done that.
• The 5 minute DBA: MySQL DBA 101 for Non DBA’s. Get started fast with Matt Yonkovit’s friendly, engaging and relevant talk. Spoiler: it’s longer than five minutes.
• MySQL Optimizer Standoff MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 5.3. Peter at it again, this time digging into the advances in newer releases of the server, which make a huge difference on some common and important workloads.
• Scaling MySQL Databases for the Web. This is the “Vitess” talk, a technology I’m extremely keen to hear about. It’s now powering YouTube’s backend.
• BoF session: Tungsten User Fest. Tungsten has matured into a very interesting technology in the last couple of years.

On Thursday:

• Oracle to MySQL migration. Marco Tusa has actually implemented some of the most impressive migrations in MySQL’s history.
• Spil Games: Outgrowing an internet startup. This should be a great talk about running MySQL in a busy startup in the real world.
• Here I’m torn between MySQL and SSD: usage and tuning and Common Schema: a framework for MySQL server administration. (I’m always torn between at least 2 or 3 talks, but in this case especially so for some reason.)
• Verifying MySQL Replication Safely With pt-table-checksum 2.0. If you aren’t verifying that your replicas have the same data as their masters, you need to, and this is the tool to do it.