Xaprb

I wish I could be at this: Percona Live San Francisco. It is on February 16th. Cost is minimal, and content is maximal. The topic is on what’s new in MySQL these days beyond 5.1: the new 5.5 release, HandlerSocket, MariaDB, and of course Percona Server.

This is a follow-up to the enormously successful Percona Performance Conference in 2009.

I’ll be helping Morgan Tocker deliver the second half of his training course for MySQL Developers/DBAs in New York City in a few days (more Percona training). It was a snap decision at the last minute, but I’m hoping I’ll still get to meet some folks there. If we’ve corresponded over email or blog comments and you would like to get together, ping me in the comments here!

If you’re in the New York City area and you use MySQL, you should consider attending this course, too. Morgan knows his stuff and has written a good curriculum. Attendees give his courses excellent feedback, and the price is very reasonable. Oh, and I’ll be there too, did I mention that? You can pick my brain, no extra charge. Bring organic free-trade chocolate to assist with extra-tough questions.

Last week I attended the Enterprise LAMP Summit and Camp in Nashville, Tennessee. I enjoyed the event and met or reconnected with a lot of great people. I was glad to be able to spend time with some folks from the Postgres community. My own sessions focused on MySQL.

During the Summit I tried to help people understand how to think about performance, and made the case that the Percona versions of the MySQL server are not only the highest-performance available, but uniquely provide the instrumentation necessary to follow a disciplined performance optimization process such as Method R or Goal-Driven Performance Optimization.

At the Camp the next day, there were several sessions on MySQL. My talk was later in the day, so I elected to skip slides and design a talk by taking questions from the audience, then answering them. I thought the attendees had heard enough generic “advice in a vacuum” kind of content by that point in the day. Again I tried to focus on understanding performance and taking a methodical approach.

During the Summit I counted about 65 people at one point, so I suspect there were really about 100 people really in attendance during the day. I think there were slightly more at the Camp. It was a good networking event, and I not only made some good connections, I found opportunities to connect some mutual friends too. The speakers were great quality by and large. There was little to no marketing or sales content, which was welcome. Overall I thought the event was very well done, with only slight glitches that you’d expect at a first-time event. I hope there is a repeat next year and that I am invited to speak again!