This seems like an appropriate place to mention a few words about the conference organization. The number of people involved is staggering (100+). The logistics — the number of tasks, vendors, contracts, and so on — blows the mind. The upfront cost is literally unmentionable. It’s an exponentially bigger deal in every way than any of the conferences we’ve done before. There is no way to explain it to anyone who isn’t involved. I don’t even comprehend it myself.

Despite this, we are working hard to ensure that the traditions we’ve known and loved for years are continued. It turns out that they all have a very high cost in real dollars. We are constantly faced with hard decisions that always involve “how are we going to pay for this?” I wish that, for example, it could be simple and lightweight to organize BOFs. But there are unions and contracts and room minimums and overtime pay and bundled quotes and restrictions every which way. Nothing is simple, nothing is easy, nothing is cheap — regardless of how simple, easy, and cheap it should be.

And yet, there will be BOFs and dot-org booths and Drizzle Day and all the rest. And the ticket price is a lot less than it was last year. If you appreciate this, you can help by getting attendees to come. Please promote the conference to everyone you know, in every way you know. Use Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, everything. Blog about it. Mention it in-person. Ask your boss to send you and your colleagues, or send your team if you’re the boss. Send email to your meetups and user groups and mailing lists, and ask them to promote it to their networks too. Enough said.

Further Reading:

• There will be an O’Reilly MySQL Conference in April 2010
• I’ll be speaking at the O’Reilly MySQL Conference 2010
• Speaking at EdUI Conference 2009
• The MySQL Conference will be very good this year
• Postgres folks, consider the 2011 MySQL conference

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For those of you who don’t know what this is, it’s another of the O’Reilly traditions we’re trying to continue. (We are trying very hard to make this event as close to a clone of O’Reilly’s as we can.) It’s a free table in the expo hall where people who participate in a non-commercial open source project can exhibit. I organized a Maatkit booth a few times in the past, and was always really grateful to O’Reilly for making the space available. Space in the expo hall is at a premium, but we think that these dot-org booths are even more valuable to the open-source projects and the conference attendees.

So, please tell your friends who care about open source, and ask them to tell their friends too. Let’s get some great open-source projects into the expo hall, alongside the commercial vendors!

View full post on MySQL Performance Blog

We have many talks which are covering Oracle MySQL, and forks such as MariaDB, Drizzle and Percona Server are well covered too. You will also have a chance to learn about commercial MySQL alternatives such as Clustrix and SchoonerSQL from our sponsors.

At the same time this is the conference for MySQL Community. We’re talking about other database systems only as it comes to migration to MySQL and about NoSQL technologies such as Memcached,Redis,Sphinx which are commonly used to supplement MySQL.

The space was very tight this year and competition was very tough. We had over 300 proposals for approximately 60 slots. As results committee had to make a lot of very tough choices and many great talks could not be accommodated.

We have a great Conference Committee this year who has done a great job getting the schedule together. I can’t thank them enough !

See you in April in Santa Clara for MySQL Conference and lets make this event an amazing success !

View full post on Planet Drizzle

We have many talks which are covering Oracle MySQL, and forks such as MariaDB, Drizzle and Percona Server are well covered too. You will also have a chance to learn about commercial MySQL alternatives such as Clustrix and SchoonerSQL from our sponsors.

At the same time this is the conference for MySQL Community. We’re talking about other database systems only as it comes to migration to MySQL and about NoSQL technologies such as Memcached,Redis,Sphinx which are commonly used to supplement MySQL.

The space was very tight this year and competition was very tough. We had over 300 proposals for approximately 60 slots. As results committee had to make a lot of very tough choices and many great talks could not be accommodated.

We have a great Conference Committee this year who has done a great job getting the schedule together. I can’t thank them enough !

See you in April in Santa Clara for MySQL Conference and lets make this event an amazing success !

View full post on MySQL Performance Blog

This event will not be as large as some of the other events we’ve run, with a capacity of about 200. Frankly, we are targeting this to more local attendees. We know that a lot of people simply can’t travel out to Santa Clara for the main MySQL conference every year, and we want to make sure there is great technical content for them. This is part of our idea to host smaller regional events periodically to try to make sure top-quality MySQL events are more accessible to all, not just the privileged.

We have the entire hallway, with a number of large rooms, immediately off the Metro stop. This event couldn’t be easier to attend if you’re inside the Beltway. We are right outside the Metro doors. If you’re from outside the area, we suggest taking the Metro in for the day. Detailed travel instructions and hotel suggestions (if you need them) are listed on the event venue page. (I’ve personally stayed in the hotels listed there and found them to be great.)

This is a great opportunity to learn from experts, recruit, and network in Washington DC. I personally will be there because I’m close and this is something of a pet project for me. I hope to see you there, and would appreciate it if you tell your friends about the event.

View full post on MySQL Performance Blog

• We created a conference committee.
• We created a conference website that allows people to create an account and submit proposals. We’re currently looking for session proposals; more on that later.
• We have been working hard on the logistics of the venue, food and beverage, audio/visual, power, networking, exhibit hall, registration, hotel rooms, and a number of other things.

It probably won’t surprise you to hear that we’ve been learning a lot. For example, we had a few rough spots with the conference website; this is a much harder task than it seems. But that’s under control.

Fortunately, we have three great people here at Percona working on this. There’s Mauricio Stekl, the webmaster. Kortney Runyan is our fulltime conference director, and if you went to our New York or London Percona Live events you saw her in action. And we have our new Chief Marketing Officer, Terry Erisman, who has experience running big events at his previous employers such as DotNetNuke. Terry and Kortney have assembled a team of service providers to help line everything up. The staff at the Santa Clara Hyatt have been invaluable, too.

The result is that the conference is going to be very similar to O’Reilly’s. The A/V and room layout teams, for example, have a lot of experience from previous events, and they’re setting things up identically. We have the same rooms for the sessions, the same expo hall, the same layout, the same stage, the same A/V, and so on. Our guiding principle is that there should be no surprises when you show up in Santa Clara. O’Reilly did a great job with this show, and we think it’s hard to go wrong imitating it.

Now, to make a conference succeed — and I think we all agree that everyone needs this event to succeed — we need a few things. We need attendees, sponsors, exhibitors, speakers, and content.

This is where you come into the picture. If you can help us promote the event, please do. Tell your friends; put promotional banners on your blog; and most of all, help us get great session proposals.

What is a great session proposal? First of all, a great session proposal is audience-focused. Your audience is dual: the people who come to hear you speak, and the conference committee. Submit a session that’s focused on the needs of the attendees, but make sure that it’s also understandable to the committee, who have to assess and vote on the submissions. Make sure that after the committee approves the session, attendees who are browsing through the event program will understand whether the talk is appropriate and interesting to them. There are several good blog posts on how to write a good proposal.

What kind of content do we need? In previous years, I think we had some assumptions that we didn’t recognize. The community submitted a wide variety of talks about interesting things such as how they scaled MySQL, how they abused it in ways its creators didn’t intend and got good (or at least interesting) results, how to do super-advanced and extreme things with MySQL, how to use MySQL for a Ruby on Rails application with MongoDB and Redis too, and so forth. The commercial vendors submitted talks about their solutions and how they can benefit MySQL users. And I think we always just relied on a cadre of the core MySQL developers to submit talks about what is new in MySQL, the MySQL roadmap for the future, and bread-and-butter talks about topics such as how replication works, new features in the query optimizer, the storage engine architecture, and so on. The point is that this year, we need to make this assumption explicit: we need full coverage of the breadth and depth of topics, not just the mad scientist topics.

So, please get your creative juices flowing, and submit those session and tutorial proposals on DRBD, partitioning, community toolkits, security, using MySQL with NoSQL, geospatial functionality, cloud computing, Cluster, search, sharding, memcached, high availability, DevOps, Big Data, SSD storage, data warehousing, and all those other great topics. If you need inspiration, look at the schedule for previous years.

The most important thing is that you share what you know — even if it doesn’t seem conference-worthy to you, trust me, it is. All you have to do is show up and tell a story. Stories win, every time. Your story doesn’t have to be extreme, or expert, or hardcore, or funny, or charismatic. It just needs to be real. It is so much better to listen to someone who’s just a DBA at a company somewhere, telling about his experiences setting up replication, than to come to a session with someone who’s trying to impress you. You’ll be among rock stars who’ve built huge systems with MySQL — don’t try too hard, just be yourself and try to be helpful to your audience.

And please blog, tweet, retweet, tell your friends, tell your local user groups and meetups, and otherwise help spread the word about this event. We’ll see you in Santa Clara in April!

View full post on MySQL Performance Blog

Sphinx Team also announced Sphinx Users Conference in St. Petersburg, Russia on December 4th. This is going to be free Russian Speaking event.

This is the second Sphinx event in Russia and I really wish there would be and International Sphinx Conference somewhere in US or Western Europe. I hope we’ll see something like it in 2012.

Another thought – with Innodb Full Text Search coming up in MySQL 5.6 and Claimed to be faster than MyISAM’s I really would like to see some benchmarks comparing it to Sphinx, especially to its Real Time indexes. Some easy to understand feature comparison table would also be helpful as in many cases people use Sphinx not because it is faster – speed might not be the main thing on smaller collections but its various full text search features.

View full post on MySQL Performance Blog

My talk is going to be about new developments in MySQL Server 5.5, 5.6, Percona Server, MariaDB and Drizzle as it relates to high volume/large scale projects. There is a lot of really cool things happening in MySQL space recently and I would love to share those with you.

I’m also doing a training session 5th of October, which will be in depth training session based on Percona’s Training for MySQL Developers. In fact this is a great learning experience both for MySQL Developers and DBAs and this is unique opportunity to attend this course
given in Russian. Bring your laptop if you have one for more Hands On experience.

If you would like to do business with Percona I will be available for business development and consulting meetings on Thursday and Friday next week.

Finally note We’re Hiring worldwide for most of positions, so if you’re interested joining Percona Team, come and talk to me. We have both technical and non technical positions, in particular we’re looking for Sales and Business Development person in Russia.

Why so late announcement. Ah if you must know I did not know if I will be able to make it until very last minute. My passport was stalled in the British Consulate getting visa to UK for Percona Live London in late October. It is great we could get the documents back in time for my travel.

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