Tuesday, March 12, 2013

Sessions at Percona Live MySQL Conference 2013: fun, competition, novelties, and a free pass

Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo, April 22-25, 2013

The Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo 2013 is almost 1 month away. It's time to start planning, set the expectations, and decide what to attend. This post will give a roundup of some of the sessions that I recommend attending and I look forward to.

First, the unexpected!

After much talk and disbelief, here they come! Oracle engineers will participate to the Percona Live conference. This is wonderful! Their participation was requested by the organizers, by the attendees, and by community advocates, who all told the Oracle management how important it is to be in this conference. Finally, they have agreed to come along, and here they are, with one keynote and three general sessions.

My talks

I will be a speaker at the conference, and thus it's no surprise that I will recommend my talks.

My company's talks

Continuent is very active at many conferences, and at this one we are participating massively. I know I look partial in this matter, but I am really proud of the products that we create and maintain at my company. That's why I highly recommend these talks.

Competing with whom?

MySQL is a standard, and widely popular. Yet, it has shortcomings and weak points, which allow for alternative solutions to flourish. There are many sessions that offer alternatives to the vanilla software.

  • [Tue 1:20pm] MariaDB Cassandra Interoperability. MariaDB is a magnetic fork of MySQL. It's magnetic in the sense that it attract most of the features or enhancements that nobody else wanted to accept. While some of its features may look like a whim (and some of them have been discontinued already), there are some that look more interesting than others. This integration with Cassandra deserves some exploration.
  • [Tue 3:50pm] MySQL Cluster - When to use it and when not to. The classic MySQL Cluster. Some believe that it's a drop-in replacement for a single server. It's not. It's a powerful solution, but it is not fit for all.
  • [Wed 11:10am] Fine Tuning Percona XtraBackup to your workload. This tool has become a de-facto standard. It is available everywhere, easy to use, and powerful. A great tale of an alternative tool that became the standard.
  • [Thu 9:00am] MySQL, YourSQL, NoSQL, NewSQL - the state of the MySQL ecosystem While all the keynotes are worth attending, this one is special. If you want to understand the MySQL world, Matt Aslett can draw a quite useful map for you.

New and renewed technologies

There are many interesting talks about new things, or old technologies with a new twist.

Tales from the trenches

Win a free pass

Percona is offering free passes for community participation. One of them is available to readers of this blog and I will be the judge.

To get a free pass, do the following:

  1. Blog, tweet, or post on another public media about this conference;
  2. Leave a comment here, with a link to your post;
  3. The free pass will be given to the most useful or pleasant post;
  4. Make sure there is a way to reach you by email or twitter;
Please notice:
  • I will award the free pass to the post that I like most. The adjudication will be entirely subjective.
  • Deadline: March 20th, 2013.

3 comments:

WheresGeorge said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
WheresGeorge said...

Hi Giuseppe,

Thanks for the post. I'm happy to help promote Percona -- I went last year and had a blast. So as you requested, I made a post about the conference on my Facebook page for Where's George? (the currency tracking website I own and run: https://www.facebook.com/WheresGeorge/posts/433695536715058 (the Where's George? Facebook page currently has 24,000 followers). Hope to see you at the conference!

-Hank Eskin

You can reach me at staff@wheresgeorge.com

WheresGeorge said...

Hi again Giuseppe!

Thank you for the free pass! I'm self-employed, so it really goes a long way in making Percona Live affordable!

I was actually hoping other people would post for two reasons -- first, I wanted to win on the actual merits of my post, and second, get more people to promote Percona Live! I'm really surprised nobody else posted.

See you in San Clara, and let me know if there is anything I can do to return the gesture.

-Hank