Colin Charles Agenda

A few notes about the MySQL Conference & Expo 2010.

1. Check out the schedule. Its more packed than you can imagine. You’re going to want to be in many places at once, by the looks of it.
2. O’Reilly Radar has an interview with Ronald Bradford: MySQL migration and risk management. You’ll get a teaser as to Ronald’s thoughts, and a bit of information about his two talks at the conference on migrating from Oracle to MySQL. He has swanky titles for them: Ignition and Liftoff! Expect a lot of technical meat in both these talks…
3. The idea of “mini-tutorials”. Some talks take longer than 45 minutes to deliver, so why not have 90 minute sessions? Ronald’s is a good example of this, though it’s spread over 2 days. We have more:
   • Don Beesing and John Powell talking on Where it’s at: GeoSpatial MySQL Part 1 and Part 2.
   • Tobias Asplund and Konstantin Osipov will talk about everything stored procedures in their 2 part series.
   • Peter Zaitsev will speak about InnoDB Architecture and Performance Optimization and the complementary Part 2.
   • And if you’re interested in Gearman, there’s a spread over the three days, about it! Join Giuseppe Maxia and Eric Day to run you through: Getting Started with Gearman for MySQL, followed by Boosting Database Performance with Gearman and finally Gearman MySQL Hacks, or Everything You Wanted to Do with a Database Server and You Never Dared to Hope.

So, have you registered yet? Early bird registrations ends March 15 2010.

This is a quick update on the O’Reilly MySQL Conference & Expo 2010, happening April 12-15 2010 in Santa Clara.

1. We’ve put up a preliminary schedule, and you can expect this to be fast moving/changing, as we confirm more talks. A tradeoff of this, is that you can now also see the sessions by track, which helps give you an overview of where the content really is.
2. If you’re attending the conference, why not promote it? We have lots of badges and banners for attendees.
3. If you’re a speaker, you sure want to fill that room up, so why not help promote the conference using the speaker version of the badges and banners?

So if you were wondering what kind of talks we have, beyond just the quick taster we had earlier, this should help you decide quickly, and register before February 22 2010. Why? Because you save a cool USD$250, which you can then use to buy beer at the Hyatt ;-) (because that’s where more cool discussion happens late into the night!)

I think Giuseppe (the man with too many blogs!) was a little too optimistic in his last post… the MySQL Conference Call for Participation has received an amazing amount of proposals, but not enough by our standards.

I personally believe there should be a 1:3 accepted-rejected ratio. Currently, its not there yet. Why do I like such high ratios? It means that there are actually so many good talks, and we (the voting committee) pick the best of the best, to give attendees the most mileage for their time and money. Or am I too harsh?

Anyway, the word on the street is that we will extend the Call for Participation, mostly because it is the right thing to do, and lots of people expect it. Expect an official announcement to go out soon about this. But remember, you’d be loved more if you submitted before midnight (PDT) on October 22.

It is no secret that I am the Program Chair for the MySQL Conference & Expo 2009, and am truly excited about it (big shoes to fill in from Jay). I expect it to be a great conference, with over 2,000 attendees and lots and lots of great talks. The paper submissions have been coming through, the excellent voters have been voting, and the progress is impressive. Its a great learning experience.

Now, I’m excited to tell you that I’m also going to organise the Open Source Databases MiniConf at linux.conf.au 2009. Its going to be in Hobart, Tasmania, in January 2009, and again, I’m excited. Read the press release for more.

Why is this exciting? Because we’ll have a two-day mini-conference, as opposed to the usual one day. There might even be time for tutorials. And now, we’re combining all the great databases out there, not just focusing on MySQL or PostgreSQL (as we have in the past). Come discuss on anything from CouchDB, Drizzle, SQLite, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Derby/JavaDB and many more. Next up is setting the wiki, and an appropriate e-mail address (we already have mysql-miniconf[at]mysql[dot]com, but maybe I’ll ask for osdb or something soon) to accept papers.

Lots of conference organising fun, coming right up!