Presenting at Percona Live and SkySQL MariaDB Solutions Day in Santa Clara

MySQL community conferences are alive and well in 2012.   Percona has taken the initiative to host the yearly MySQL event at the Santa Clara Hyatt; it's now called Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo.  It runs from 10 through 12 April.  But don't plan on going home Thursday night.  On Friday 13 April you can also attend the SkySQL and MariaDB MySQL Solutions Day in the same location.  And wait, that's not all!  Drizzle Day is also on 13 April and also at the Hyatt, so you can catch up on what the Drizzle folks have been up to for the last 12 months.

Now for some specifics on the conferences where Continuent will be appearing.  Percona did an outstanding job of organizing conferences in 2011 and has a strong line-up for the 2012 Santa Clara event that includes a number of talks related to Tungsten.  Several of my Continuent colleagues, including Ed Archibald, Jeff Mace, and Giuseppe Maxia will be presenting.  I'm also pleased to report that the committee selected two of my proposals:

* Be a Data Management Hero with Good Backups! -- My worst mistake in 35 years of working in IT involved backups.  It's important to get them right.

* Boost Your Replication Throughput with Parallel Apply, Prefetch, and Batching (with my colleague Stephane Giron, aka the master of the MySQL binlog)  -- We will cover how Tungsten speeds up replication in multiple ways, including new techniques like automatic batch loading that have not previously been available to MySQL users.

There will likely be a BOF for Tungsten--not confirmed but I am hopeful--on one of the evenings.    Please stop by if you would like to meet the engineers, and talk about Tungsten.  Afterwards we'll buy you a drink.  It comes out of the Continuent marketing budget, which proves that free software sometimes is linked to free beer.

Meanwhile, the SkySQL and MariaDB Solutions Day is new, at least for me.  Giuseppe Maxia and I will be doing a talk on building scalable apps with Tungsten replication and clustering.  It will stress how to build very large MySQL installations using Continuent's products.  I am looking forward to this conference, because we don't see as much on MariaDB here in the US as we do on the Oracle and Percona flavors of MySQL.  This is a great way for US-based folks to catch up. I also like the fact it will cover open source and commercial products like Tungsten Enterprise (our software) that help users take full advantage of MySQL.  Not everything needs to be open source to be cost-effective and useful.

Last year I suggested that we all lay down the fish for a while to work on conferences that build the MySQL community and sustain innovation.  Continuent will support any conference that meets those simple criteria.  I'm delighted that we are able to help sponsor both Percona Live and the SkySQL and MariaDB Solution Day to make Santa Clara worth visiting in April.  I look forward to meeting a lot of old friends and making new ones.  Please stop by and introduce yourself if you attend.