PerconaLive 2014 program is published

PerconaLive 2014 program is published

After a few months of submissions and reviews, the program for PerconaLive MySQL Conference and Expo 2014 is published. The conference will be held in Santa Clara, from April 1 to 4, 2014.

Registration with early bird discount is available until February 2nd. If you plan to attend, this is probably the best time to act.

I will be presenting twice at the conference:

• MySQL Replication: Advanced features in all flavors it’s a 3 hours tutorial where I compare the features produced in the last years by MySQL, MariaDB, Tungsten, and show how well they work.
• Multi-master made easy: complex topologies with Tungsten Replicator it’s a 50-minutes session that explains how to create multi-master topologies, beyond the usual paradigms. In addition to all-masters, star, fan-in, I will show how to mix cases from these topologies to make multi-master usage powerful and easy.

Notice that the Call for Participation is still open for lightning talks and BoF. You can submit a talk until the end of January.

Call for papers (with lightning talks): Percona Live MySQL Conference 2014

The call for participation for Percona Live MySQL Conference 2014 is still open. As part of the review committee, I will be looking at the proposals, and I hope to see many interesting ones.

There is a novelty in the submission form. In addition to tutorials and regular sessions, now you can submit proposals for lightning talks, to which I am particularly interested, as I have organized the lightning talks in the past two editions, and I am in charge to continue the tradition for the next one.

If you want to be a speaker at the conference, here are some tips to get your proposal accepted:

• Propose a topic that you know well;
• Take some time to write a well thought and meaningful proposal: nothing gets me faster to the rejection button than statements like “I want to talk about X, I will think of something to say”;
• Write your proposal with the attendees in mind, i.e. giving information that will make them want to see your presentation;
• But also write with the committee in mind. There is a space for private messages to the reviewers. Use it wisely if there is something that we need to know.
• Mind your buzzwords. I am not easily impressed by fashionable topics. Back your proposal with sound reasoning. Don’t assume that I, or anyone in the committee, see things your way, or the way they are reported in the press.
• Check your spelling. Another way of getting rejected quickly is when you misspell the topic you claim to be an expert of.
• And check your spelling again. If you miss the difference between “know its shit” and “know it’s shit,” I am less inclined to approve.
• Write a sensible bio. We need to know who are you and what you do, to see if your story is compatible with your proposal.
• Write enough to make your proposal clear. A proposal that is shorter than your bio will raise a red flag. But do not write too much. You are writing a proposal, not an article on the matter. If you have written an interesting article on the topic, give us an URL.

Regarding the lightning talks, I have some more recommendations.

• A lightning talk last 5 minutes maximum. Don’t propose a topic that cannot be exhausted in that timeframe.
• An accepted lightning talk does not give you a free pass (unless you are also accepted as speaker for a regular talk). You will be given a code to register at a 15% discount.
• You should propose something that it is either highly interesting, or surprising, or entertaining, or all the above: the lightning talks are a show.
• Be daring in your proposals. While a regular talk might be refused if you propose to sing the InnoDB settings, a LT on this topic could be seen as legitimate (but you must demonstrate that you can do it!)
• Convince me (specifically, as I will be choosing the talks accepted by the committee) that you want to be on stage and have the abilities for the show.
• Be prepared to show your slides earlier than usual. As the organizer, I need to make sure that you have something meaningful to show before sending you on stage.
• Be aware of the rules:
  • All slides will be loaded into a single computer, to minimize delays between talks;
  • Someone (probably me) will nag the speakers until they either surrender their slides or escape to Mexico;
  • All speakers will meet 15 minutes before the start, and be given the presentation order. Missing speakers will be replaced by reserve speakers;
  • The speaker will have 5 minutes to deliver the talk.
  • When one minute is left, there will be a light sound to remind of the remaining time.
  • When 10 seconds are left, most likely the audience will start chanting the countdown.
  • When the time is finished, the speaker must leave the podium to the next one.

If you have reached this point, you are ready to submit a proposal!

See also:

• Lightning Talks at Percona Live MySQL Conference 2012
• Lightning talks at Percona Live MySQL Conference 2013

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.

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.