Submissions at Percona Live Santa Clara 2014 and Lightning talks

The call for participation at Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo 2014 is now closed. There have been more than 320 submissions, and this will keep the review committee busy for a while.

One important point for everyone who has submitted: if you have submitted a proposal but haven’t included a bio in your account, do it now. If you don’t, your chances of being taken seriously are greatly reduced. To add a bio, go to your account page and fill in the Biography field. Including a picture is not mandatory, but it will be definitely appreciated.

Although the CfP is closed for tutorials and regular sessions, your chances of becoming a celebrity are not over yet. The CfP is still open for Lightning talks and Bird of a Feather sessions.

If you want to submit a lightning talk, you still have time until the end of January. Don’t forget to read the instructions and remember that lightning talks don’t give you a free pass, but a healthy 20% discount.

So far, I have received 16 proposals. Of these, 6 have been rated highly enough to guarantee acceptance (including mine, for which I have not voted.) We still have 6 spots to fill (12 spots in total, 5 minutes each,) and I’d rather fill them with talks that appeal to everyone in the committee, than scrap the barrel of the mediocre ones. My unofficial goal is to have so many good submissions that I will have to withdraw my own talk. Thus, the potential number of available spots is 7. Please kick my talk off stage, by submitting outstanding proposals!

My speaking engagements - Q4 2012

After a long pause in the speaking game, I am back.

It's since April that I haven't been on stage, and it is now time to resume my public duties.

• I will speak at MySQL Connect in San Francisco, just at the start of Oracle Open World, with a talk on MySQL High Availability: Power and Usability. It is about the cool technology that is keeping me busy here at Continuent, which can make life really easy for DBAs. This talk will be a demo fest. If you are attending MySQL Connect, you should see it!
• A happy return for me. On October 27th I will talk about open source databases and the pleasures of command line operations at Linux Day in Cagliari, my hometown. Since I speak more in California than in my own backyard, I am happy that this year I managed to get a spot here.
• The company will have a team meeting in Nopvember (Barcelona, here we come!) and from there I will fly to Bulgaria, where I am speaking at the Bulgarian Oracle User Group conference. Here I will have two talks, one about MySQL for business, and the other is "MySQL High Availability for the masses".
• A few days later, again on the road, in London, for Percona Live, with a talk on MySQL High Availability: Power, Magic, and Usability. It is again about our core products, with some high technology fun involved. I will show how our tools can test the software, spot the mistakes, fix the cluster, and even build a step-by-step demo.

See you around. Look for me carefully, though. I may look differently from how I have been depicted so far.

The "Chemistry" of MySQL

Searching for MySQL with WolframAlpha, the latest entry in the search engines arena, I had a surprise:

Interpreting "mysql" as "mycil"
Input interpretation:
 chlorphenesin

A further search for chlorphenesin, explains that it is a drug pertaining to the "central muscle relaxants" category.

Italians strike back

What follows is the text of my "Swedish" blog. Look mom, I am blogging in Swedish! I am starting a blog in Swedish. Now, why should I do such a thing? I usually blog in English, and I don't even bother blogging in my native Italian. Most importantly, I do not speak Swedish at all. So, why bother? My friend and colleague Kaj Arnö had the gall of starting a blog in Italian, a fact that surprised me and made me envious at the same time.

He started talking about Italy, a country he visits often and he loves. I have little experience of Finland, having visited only once, but where I enjoyed warm hospitality.
I Visited Kaj in his homeland, in Nagu, a charming island West of Turku. The weather was not warm, but friendship and good food was a suitable compensation.

I am choosing to blog in in Swedish because Kaj's mother tongue is Swedish, although he lives in Finland. During my visit to Nagu and other island of the Finnish archipelago, I heard little Finnish and plenty of Swedish.

This experiment wants to show that anyone can blog in (mostly) any language, given the right tools. Hello Kaj!

Scary reading advice

Inspired by the Arctic Dolphin's scary movies, I dug out some reading advice that I made during the MySQL Developers meeting in Riga.

Jack Kerouac, On The RoadMap, a fictionalized autobiography of a senior engineer on a cross country bohemian odyssey after failing to deliver 5.1 GA for the fifth time.

Ken Kesey, One flew over the cuckoo's nested query. A story of love and madness involving a quiet Engineering department. When Jeffrey McMurphy, a convicted felon who's faking insanity to escape a prison sentence, is sent to the Database Group asylum, life changes instantly for the other guests.
A subtle tragedy involving a marketing planner, a virgin junior engineer, and a swordfish develops inexorably, leaving the main character with a headache, while the chief of engineering runs away with the bath sink.

Umberto Eco, The name of the release. Young novice Zack of Melk tells the story of his master, Friar Marten of Baskerville, faced with the sudden suicide of his beloved Five-One-Twenty-Two release. The mystery thickens when another release, Five-One-Twenty-Three, is found dead in a puddle of blood, and again when the scribe Five-One-Twenty-Four is poisoned. Three more releases are slaughtered before some light is finally shed on the story, and the murder is revealed, and the surviving release Five-One-Thirty is finally sent to preach in the outside world.