First MySQL/NoSQL/Cloud Latin America Conference

This last week was the first time we have this kind event here in Argentina, of course this is a great initiative and a good starting point for next events.

My impressions: being the first time that these kind of conferences were done in Argentina I have to say it was great, small but great. Not many people knew about the event and even that the response was pretty good. It was a 3 day event with plenty of technical talks and some others talks coming from Companies who wanted to share experiences and impressions on what is coming for MySQL technologies.

1st day:
- Started with a talk about MySQL Cluster 7.2 conducted by Massimo Brignoli from SkySQL. Good talk, it was more an overview about cluster features than a deep and technical talk. The topic is too large to be explained in just 3 hours so no time to go too deep.

- Max Mether from SkySQL spoke about MySQL in general, giving an overview about main features like mysqld architecture, replication, storage engines, network. Again this is a very large topic to be treated in a single session but talk was clear enough to have a good understanding of what MySQL is.

- Our ex-collegues Sherri Cabral(Mozilla) and Gerry Narvaja (Tokutek) talked about monitoring mysql, they were talking about general monitoring using internal and external tools, and deep monitoring about not only mysql but general environment (IO, Network, etc) The talk was awesome, good level and deep enough to have an idea on what to check, how to monitor and how to avoid issues using proper monitoring.

2nd day:
- Alfredo Kojima from Oracle talked about MySQL Workbench, it wasn’t that good as the others because it was more an introduction to MySQL Workbench, how to design databases (ERD), DDL and DB documentation.

- Massimo Brignoli give a great talk about HA solutions. He made an overview of available technologies like MHA, Tungsten replicator and Tungsten Enterprise, Galera, Percona xTradb cluster, and combinations of different solutions to achieve real 5 nines on HA. Cluster, Virtualization, DRDB, etc. It was all theoretic but there was an additional session with practice samples (which I couldn’t attend).

- Nelson Calero (independent consultant) talked about health infrastructure and industry standards using MariaDB. It was very nice to understand how Uruguay is trying to merge their health systems using Open Source software (of course starting with MariaDB)

- Jonathan Traving (fanBridge) presentation was about mongoDB, good talk, very clear and very well documented. I’m still wondering why people wants to migrate to a NoSQL solution, I have a theory, they are replacing DBA with developers. It’s a little bit paranoid theory but works for me.

- Ronald Bradford’s talk about improving performance with better indexes was simply awesome. Incredibly clear and short enough to understand almost every good tip to get better indexing and query performance.

3rd day:
- Wow, first talk was amazing. It was likely being slapped with information. Martin Farach Colton from Tokutek talked about indexing techniques, from B-Trees to Fractal Tree indexing. Some benchmarks and projections about how information is stored and what will be the evolution in terms of indexing and storage considering how information is growing.

- MariaDB talk done by Coling Charles (Monty Program) was more informative than technical. Some slides with benchmarking graphs to demonstrate MariaDB’s evolution and why this is becoming a great choice to replace MySQL.

- Tomas Zon (Boo Box) made a presentation about common issues and situations faced by sysadmins while administering MySQL servers.

- Maximiliano Bubenick (Vostu) talked about cloud services on Amazon and how his company is supporting social gaming on Orkut for a 100MM users using MySQL running on Amazon, great talk.

- Ok it’s my turn, my first time presenting in a conference. I had a well concurred presentation about replication. I think it was good but I prefer to wait for feedback from audience.

- Fernando Mattera (despegar.com) made a really good presentation talking about Casandra. Good documentation, uses cases and so on. Really recommended.

- Ronald Bradford (gosh this guy rocks!!) final talk about Backup/Recovery techniques and tools, again I only can say this guy is awesome, very clear, very detailed without being so long, which I think is the perfect balance for a talk.

- Finally a closing and open debate about the conference followed by the classic Black Vodka (provided by SkySQL) toast where we discussed about how conference was and what should be the goals for next year (yay!!)

And last, but not least, my conclusions about the conference: I think in general it was awesome, of course there are many things to fix but being the first time that this kind of conference was done in Latin America it was really great.
Many cool things on the road, very good people sharing knowledge but the most important thing I’ve noted it the spirit present in the conference. Everyone of assistants/speakers was there to share knowledge and experiences, it’s simply amazing, specially coming from those who arrived to Buenos Aires the same day that conference started.

I’m looking forward for next year conference, very exited to be a part of this great community.