Xaprb

I wish I could be at the Hotsos Symposium. I would keep my mouth very tightly closed and my ears wide open, and try to learn from people who are completely out of my league about performance analysis topics I won’t grok for another decade (if I’m lucky). But I just can’t cram in that much travel.

If you’re like me, why don’t you go to the O’Reilly MySQL Conference instead? I’ll be trying my feeble best to bring some of the Oracle performance scientist’s mentality to this event, with presentations such as my Forecasting MySQL Performance and Scalability session. And a lot of smart people will be there from many database communities. Percona has a 20% discount, too — not a bad enticement.

I’ll be presenting several sessions at the O’Reilly MySQL Conference & Expo 2011, which is April 11-14 in Santa Clara, California. I recommend this conference to anyone interested in open-source databases including MySQL, PostgreSQL, CouchDB, MongoDB, and others. There is very good coverage of a diverse list of open-source databases.

My sessions are as follows:

• Building on Strengths, Learning from Differences: a keynote address on the open-source database ecosystem, how we got here, and what we can do to make the most of the future.
• Forecasting MySQL Performance and Scalability: mathematical models for forecasting performance and scalability that actually work and are not hard to do. (Example)
• The Aspersa System Administrator’s Toolkit: this is an under-appreciated toolkit at the moment, but it could be the next Maatkit.

In addition, I am listed as presenting Diagnosing and Fixing MySQL Performance Problems, a 3-hour tutorial on how to find and solve performance problems with swift and definite results. However, I actually have a scheduling conflict and a couple of my colleagues will present this instead.

O’Reilly’s 2011 edition of the MySQL conference has an expanded agenda, with good representation from Postgres, CouchDB, MongoDB, and others. Take a look at the full schedule listing, which is being filled out as talks are approved and the speakers verify that they’ll give the session.

I am certainly looking forward to this year’s event. A tremendous amount of progress has landed in GA versions of open-source databases this year. To name just a couple, there’s a new version of Postgres (9.0) with built-in replication and many more improvements; there’s MySQL 5.5 GA; there’s the HandlerSocket NoSQL interface to MySQL; Drizzle has a beta release; and the list goes on. I believe that this conference will have balanced and representative coverage of what’s really important to users. It isn’t dominated by any vendor this year; O’Reilly is running the conference independently, and the committee members represent a broad spectrum of databases themselves.

In short, I am happier than I’ve ever been about this great and unique conference. It’s definitely going to be the best year so far. Thank you O’Reilly for holding it, and thank you to all the great speakers, and thanks to all the companies who sponsor the event.