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.

Call for participation for MySQL events - MySQL conference and FOSDEM

It's that time of the year where MySQL would be speakers are called to action. As usual, the main event is the MySQL spring conference, this year hosted by Percona. The call for participation to the MySQL Conference And Expo 2012 is still open until December 5th. To submit a proposal, you should register as a speaker and then fill in the form.
There is a conference committee which is already busy evaluating the proposals that have been submitted so far. The committee is demanding (I know for a fact, since I am in it!) and therefore, if you want to submit something, be very critical with yourself and polish your proposal as if your job depended on it!
Please read an update on Percona Live MySQL Conference & Expo 2012.

Speakers in Europe have some more duty, though. This is also the time to submit talks for FOSDEM MySQL DevRoom. Thanks to Frédéric Descamps and Sergey Petrunia, we have Room H.1309 with 150 seats on Sunday 5th February 2012, all day. The deadline to submit a talk proposal is December 26th. There is no review committee. Like we did on past editions, as soon as the talks are submitted, we will ask everyone to vote on the talks via Twitter or email. More updates will come soon. Of course, participation to FOSDEM DevRoom is not limited to European speakers. There have been several brave speakers who have willingly crossed the pond to offer their services at European conferences before, and they are welcome to repeat the experience. Submit your talk proposals now.

Quiet excitement at UCLA

The second leg of the Southern California MySQL Campus Tour was at UCLA. There was less attendance than Cal Poly. Only 22 brave souls who endured a lengthy session with a long tail of Q&A. The excitement came on my way back to my hotel, 25 miles from the campus. Distances have a different meaning here. A few dozen miles is just a tiny portion of the town, and so I found myself once more driving the endless highways of Los Angeles.

When I was almost home, I saw all the cars in front of me stopping, for what I believed was a traffic jam. Instead, it was a truck that was burning fiercely. When I realized that almost everyone was escaping to a side road, I took a rapid picture and then I followed suit in a prudent retreat.