Review of Sessions at O'Reilly MySQL Conference

The annual trip to Santa Clara for the O'Reilly MySQL Users Conference is like trying to get a sip of water from a full on fire hose. So much is happening at once and cruel fate steps in to make sure that there are always two 'must attend' sessions going on at the same time.

First, Tomas Ulin's keynote was great. Sorry to my European buddies, but it was like watching a major league baseball player at batting practice. Clearly, he articulated what Oracle has been doing with MySQL and then started smacking home runs out of the park with the new features. And a big thanks to Dups for getting up on stage to explain how a rushed upgrade to 5.5 produces a 25% performance gain for Empire Avenue.

The regular sessions where very good. The one that really sticks out was Baron Schwartz talk on modeling scalability. Everyone claims linear scaling but this talk explained why we do not see it.

Memachce and 5.6 and More Stable Query Execution Times by Improving InnoDB Statistics are two of the blog entries on Planet.MySQL.COM that are recommended for reading now that the conference is over. heck, it is worth scrolling back to see what you missed during the conference as a lot of good material gets lost in the flood from the UC. All the InnoDB sessions were filled and I need to hunt down the decks from those talks.

And thank you for all who ventured across the parking lot Wednesday night to attend the MySQL Community Party. A good time was had by all, even the MySQL founder who acquired a pair of dolphin balloons.