MySQL Conference 2012 Day 0

Wow what a lot has changed since the last MySQL conference I blogged about in 2007

MySQL has been acquired twice, once as MySQL by Sun and the second time around bundled with Sun when Oracle bought Sun. The conference is no longer organized by O’Reilly but by Percona. And the MySQL database itself has changed – We were talking about new features in MySQL 5.1, which wasn’t released yet, along with Falcon (where did it go?). 5.1 has long since been released as has 5.5 and we’re now talking about 5.6 instead of 6.0. There was no “Cloud” on the horizon, nor was there MariaDB, XtraDB, Drizzle, Schooner or any of the other offshoots of MySQL, all of which are creating a new buzz around the product.

Yet one thing remains constant – the vibrant community around MySQL. In spite of all the changes in technology, in ownership, in versions, branches, forks and the competitive landscape, core MySQL technology continues to thrive and grow along with the MySQL community as MySQL and its variants are adopted in more and more areas either replacing or working alongside other databases.

The upcoming talks are certainly in the same vein as in 2007 with lots of discussions around large-scale architectures, performance, replication, scaling, sharding – the usual suspects – but more interestingly, there are plenty of talks that go into the whole MySQL ecosystem, which is certainly larger than it was in 2007. New platforms like the Cloud, new tools for troubleshooting, diagnosis, testing and metrics around MySQL, new ways to offload specialized tasks like full text searching and keyvalue stores from MySQL to more efficient tools, specialized versions of MySQL that take full advantage of non-traditional hardware like the cloud or SSDs, tools to enable more efficient replication.. the list is endless.

Definitely lots of excitement in the next couple of days. Stay tuned for more information as I live-blog from the keynotes and the sessions.

If you’re at the conference, please come join us for the MySQL Community Dinner at Pedro’s and meet some of the people behind Pythian. We’re always hiring so if you’re interested, please attend the talks and tutorials being presented by Pythian folk, talk to us or check out the job openings at http://bit.ly/pythianjobs

–Raj.