Colin Charles Agenda

The O’Reilly MySQL Conference & Expo 2010 is over. I hope all of you had a good time. I have plenty of blog posts and thoughts lined up about this, but first, I’d like to point out something that has become a tradition, that was continued in 2010: the O’Reilly MySQL Conference Community Award Winners.

Tim O’Reilly was kind enough to hand out the awards this year. In case people were wondering, the awards were pewter wine goblets from Royal Selangor.

Selection of the award winners happened via voting from the alumni of winners, and was all done in a rather short period of time. Kudos to the entire team that voted. Now for the winners…

O’Reilly MySQL Community Member of the Year 2010

1. Mark Callaghan is known for his work in leading a MySQL engineering team first at Google, and now at Facebook. In addition, the panel appreciated his insightful and always tasteful blogging, ranging from insightful benchmark reports to open source community advocacy.
2. Kai ‘Oswald’ Seidler is a developer of XAMPP, a multi-platform LAMP stack, especially popular amongst Microsoft Windows users. Many users get their first contact with the AMP (Apache-MySQL-PHP) platform using XAMPP!
3. Daniel Nichter created the Hack MySQL Kit, hacks on Maatkit and heaps of other software. He’s also a fabulous MySQL DBA.

O’Reilly MySQL Application of the Year 2010
Twitter was unanimously voted to be the application of the year in 2010.

Panellist Marc Delisle described his use of Twitter recently:

“Seven weeks ago I was in Niamey, Niger during the coup d’état. While borders and the airport were closed and a tank was patrolling on my street, I took refuge at the Canadian embassy where Twitter users updated me on the situation, almost minute by minute.”

O’Reilly MySQL Corporate Sponsor of the year 2010

1. Rackspace received the award for hiring many of the core Drizzle developers, enabling them to work full-time on the MySQL fork. Rackspace also contributes to open source projects like MariaDB, Drizzle and more, providing hosting.
2. Percona has over the last years hired many valuable MySQL contributors, and have a lot of consultants and developers extending MySQL and tools around it. Percona’s team blog on MySQL performance is also highly regarded within the community.

Another picture from the excellent James Duncan Davidson:

‘Tis the day before the O’Reilly MySQL Conference & Expo 2010. You can still register onsite.

This one is long, and is divided into: Keynote Additions, Open Space, The Tweetup, and Videos/Live streaming of keynotes.

Keynote Additions
The earlier lineup was already excellent, and now we’ve filled it up more. In particular, let me draw attention to:

1. Tuesday, 10.00-10.20am: MySQL at Facebook – Mark Callaghan. Last year Mark gave you insight into his work at Google, this year he will tell you more about MySQL at Facebook.
2. Wednesday, 10.00-10.20am: Under New Management: Next Steps for the Community – Sheeri K. Cabral. Sheeri gave a community keynote last year, and it is repeated again this year, especially since we’ve had an interesting year.
3. Thursday, 9.15-10.00am: The Engines of Community – Jono Bacon. He wrote a great book, The Art of Community, and he’s the Ubuntu Community Manager.
4. Thursday, 10.00-10.20am: Best of Ignite MySQL. This one gets made up as we go along ;) Get a preview at the Ignite MySQL the day before.
5. Thursday, 3.50-4.35pm: RethinkDB: Why Start a New Database Company in 2010 by Slava Akhmechet and Michael Glukhovsky. I’m particularly excited by this – Slava and Michael are the founders of RethinkDB, and their target? MySQL on SSDs.

Open Space
Last year we had MySQL Camp. This year we have an Open Space. Feel free to schedule talks, promote it guerilla style, and run your own side sessions. It does not even need to be sessions – organise hackfests, tutorials, etc.

Twitter much? There exists a Tweetup!
If you’re on Twitter, follow the #mysqlconf hashtag (and the @mysqlconf account for latest news, discounts, contests, events, general happenings, etc.). Why not, at 9pm Tuesday night, meetup at the Lobby Bar, for the MySQL Conference & Expo Tweetup. There will be drink coupons and then a no-host bar open afterwards, so come one, come all.

If you’re on Foursquare, why not come there, check in and try and get a Swarm badge?

Videos/Livestreaming available
Want to know what Edward Screeven has to say about MySQL at Oracle? Can’t be at the conference? Pay close attention the live stream. This is something we’ll do for keynotes. You can also look at recorded videos at the blip.tv channel. Ignite sessions will also be recorded. Main conference sessions will not be officially recorded, so come on by to the conference to see them happen!

A few notes about the MySQL Conference & Expo 2010.

1. Check out the schedule. Its more packed than you can imagine. You’re going to want to be in many places at once, by the looks of it.
2. O’Reilly Radar has an interview with Ronald Bradford: MySQL migration and risk management. You’ll get a teaser as to Ronald’s thoughts, and a bit of information about his two talks at the conference on migrating from Oracle to MySQL. He has swanky titles for them: Ignition and Liftoff! Expect a lot of technical meat in both these talks…
3. The idea of “mini-tutorials”. Some talks take longer than 45 minutes to deliver, so why not have 90 minute sessions? Ronald’s is a good example of this, though it’s spread over 2 days. We have more:
   • Don Beesing and John Powell talking on Where it’s at: GeoSpatial MySQL Part 1 and Part 2.
   • Tobias Asplund and Konstantin Osipov will talk about everything stored procedures in their 2 part series.
   • Peter Zaitsev will speak about InnoDB Architecture and Performance Optimization and the complementary Part 2.
   • And if you’re interested in Gearman, there’s a spread over the three days, about it! Join Giuseppe Maxia and Eric Day to run you through: Getting Started with Gearman for MySQL, followed by Boosting Database Performance with Gearman and finally Gearman MySQL Hacks, or Everything You Wanted to Do with a Database Server and You Never Dared to Hope.

So, have you registered yet? Early bird registrations ends March 15 2010.

Its times like this, I want to hear from the greater community – the ones that are reading say, Planet MySQL or Planet MariaDB.

MySQL to me, and many others is an ecosystem. We’ve had for the longest time, complementary technology talks, like for memcached (which have been popular, filled rooms). NoSQL is becoming quite popular, and there are complementary technologies sitting around. To get an idea, if terms like the following turn you on: Hadoop, Redis, Pig, NDB (yes, MySQL Cluster is largely NoSQL before NoSQL became popular), Tokyo Tyrant, StormCloud (formerly Waffle Grid).

Now, do you want to see these kinds of talks at the MySQL Conference & Expo 2010?

Check out the schedule grid. Its pretty healthy already ;)

Also, how interested are you in talks about PostgreSQL and MySQL in similar environments? What about replicating between PostgreSQL and Drizzle?

So a simple yes/no, would help. I should get this into a poll, clearly… maybe next time.

This is a quick update on the O’Reilly MySQL Conference & Expo 2010, happening April 12-15 2010 in Santa Clara.

1. We’ve put up a preliminary schedule, and you can expect this to be fast moving/changing, as we confirm more talks. A tradeoff of this, is that you can now also see the sessions by track, which helps give you an overview of where the content really is.
2. If you’re attending the conference, why not promote it? We have lots of badges and banners for attendees.
3. If you’re a speaker, you sure want to fill that room up, so why not help promote the conference using the speaker version of the badges and banners?

So if you were wondering what kind of talks we have, beyond just the quick taster we had earlier, this should help you decide quickly, and register before February 22 2010. Why? Because you save a cool USD$250, which you can then use to buy beer at the Hyatt ;-) (because that’s where more cool discussion happens late into the night!)

The O’Reilly MySQL Conference & Expo 2010 will be closing the Call for Participation at the end of the 27th January 2010. You have less than 48-hours – so get submitting already.

Take a gander at some of the shortlisted presentations, look at all the amazing tutorials, and what’s keeping you waiting from registering?