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

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.

• [Tue 10:50am] The State of the Dolphin
• [Wed 2:50pm] MySQL 5.6: Performance Benchmarks, Tuning, and ‘Best’ Practices
• [Wed 11:50am] MySQL 5.6: Redefining Replication
• [Tue 4:50pm] MySQL 5.6: What’s New in InnoDB

My talks

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

• [Mon 1:30pm] Using Tungsten Replicator to solve replication problems. This is a complete walkout to explain Tungsten replicator, from the basics to multiple masters deployment and advanced techniques.
• [Wed 3:30pm] Script it! Make professional DBA tools out of nothing. This is a session that shows how to create admin scripts that deploy MySQL servers and put them in replication.
• [Wed 3:30pm] There is an old tradition about Lightning talks, which will happen during the community reception. I am the host of the lightning talks, but among them, there is also one of mine: MySQL Replication mythology

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.

• [Wed 9:00am] Keynote – How MySQL Can Thrive in the World of Massive Data Hype. This is no marketing. Robert Hodges explains why and how you can make business with good intentions.
• [Tue 11:30am] Getting started with Tungsten Replicator. This is alternative replication with lots of advanced features. If plain replication is unsatisfactory, that's one place to look.
• [Wed 1:00pm] State of the Art for MySQL Multi-Master Replication. Yet another talk by Robert. This one is a semi-philosophical talk, explaining what you can and can't do with multiple master technologies.
• [Wed 2:00pm] Surviving an Amazon Outage Neil Armitage explains the theory (a little) and practice (a lot) of high availability.
• [Thu 11:50am] Replicating in Real-Time Between Oracle and Oracle, and Oracle and MySQL with Tungsten. Replicating from and to Oracle used to be extremely expensive. Tungsten Replicator makes it cheap, even free!

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.

• [Tue 3:50pm] common_schema: DBA's framework for MySQL. This is the most promising collection of SQL tools that you can find. Must see.
• [Tue 4:50pm] Multi-Tier Asynchronous Replication Using Symmetricds. I don't really know what this is about, but it makes me curious.
• [Wed 1:00pm] Optimized Integration between MySQL and Hadoop by Gwen Shapira. Gwen is an expert of big data, and an excellent speaker.

Tales from the trenches

• [Wed 4:30pm] Lessons learned managing 500+ MySQL servers in the cloud
• [Thu 1:50pm] Scaling Pinterest - The Next Stage

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.

MySQL Sandbox as a riddle

Shlomi Noach is the next chairman of the Percona Live 2013. As such, he has opened the preview of the conference by posting some talks of interests, which includes a riddle to win a free pass. The riddle went unanswered, and Shlomi submitted it also to members of the review committee, getting only blank stares, including mine. Who will open your present, Make you play pleasant, Tidy your mess, Do the same for all else?

Wanting to give away the pass at all costs, Shlomi then published a new post, including subtle and less subtle hints.

Looking at the hints, it became clear that the object of the riddle, which I could not recognize, was my own MySQL Sandbox. Shame on me for not recognizing it? I don't know. I would never have guessed that a tarball is "your present". Perhaps I have too much a practical mind!

Anyway, thanks Shlomi for this bit of entertainment!

CodeBits - An event of competitive innovation

It was my pleasure and privilege to attend Codebits in 2009. As Roland Bouman says, its talk choice method is based on public voting, and therefore everyone cha have contribute to the schedule. But that is not the main reason for attending this extraordinary event. It is not just a conference. It's an innovation fest. For 1 and 1/2 days, it's a conference, where the speakers are encouraged to bring to their audience the most innovative and inspiring talks. In the afternoon of the second day, the event becomes a competition, where the teams that have registered will have 24 hours to bring a project to completion, and they have to start and finish within the allotted time. The project can be anything, and I have seen quite a lot of exciting stuff rolling live in the huge pavilion: I could hardly ignore robotics, as these little mechanical smurfs were running all over the place and you would have to be careful not to squash them when you walked. There was plenty of occasions for planning of great projects, together with attempts at improving social relations, and mixing up with big brother. There were projects based on 3D printing, and less broad projects like all-seasons keyboards. A very popular session, followed by practical workshops was lock picking. I attended one of them, learned how to pick simple and less simple locks, and I brought home some lockpicking tools. On a more technical level, I was there with Lenz Grimmer and Kai Seidler, we spoke about MySQL and other cool things, and we had lots of fun for three days. Besides the teams hacking away at their projects, there were several teams showcasing technology that had been developed by winners of the previous years, such as 3D television and intelligent phone networks. In short, This was an inspiring event, which I can warmly recommend.

Codebits 2009, coders conference and competition in Lisbon

Codebits is approaching. Form December 3rd to 5th, this gathering of 600 developers for a conference, which is also and foremost a competition, will occupy the mind of the best coders in Europe. I will be a speaker, with two sessions: Schema maintenance in MySQL, focusing mainly on MySQL Workbench, but with an introduction to the other choices. Introduction to Gearman - a distributed, language and OS independent system for dynamic programming.

Also Lenz will be there, and quite busy. He will also have two sessions:

• Why you should be using a distributed version control system (DVCS) for your project, with advice that will benefit every developer.
• MySQL High Availability Solutions - Best practices and commonly used HA setups for MySQL

The event is hardly like any other conference. It will be a momentous show, with a part that start like a conference but goes on as a competition.
If you like coding, you must show up!