Hi there!

I arrived at Santa Clara yesterday, just in time for the MySQL Community dinner (check this post on Arjen’s blog). It was a lot of fun, not to mention the opportunity to talk to developers and other folks from MySQL/Sun.

Unfortunately, I forgot to pack in my luggage a card reader or a proper cable for my camera, so pictures will have to wait a few days. To mitigate this problem, I’ll try to hunt down more posts from other guys, but in the meantime, you might want to check the 2008 MySQL Users Conference & Expo group at Flickr.

Yesterday was the “Tutorials Day”. I’ve been to many of them. The subjects were so interesting I just couldn’t stay put for the whole session so, I kept jumping from one to the other. A few quite interesting sessions: MySQL Proxy, the complete tutorial. A very interesting session on hacking and adjusting it to fit your needs. It was held by Jan Kneschke (main author and developer) and Giuseppe Maxia (testing).

MySQL Cluster, with Stewart Smith. An amazing and thorough session on MySQL Cluster - all day long. There’s nothing better than learning from the guys that actually are writing the code, right? If you are curious, his blog can be found here.

In the afternoon, there were two very interesting sessions, but I had to pick only one of them. SQL Antipatterns (by Bill Karwin) was quite interesting, but I ended up at the Ask Bjorn Hansen’s session, called Real World Web: Performance & Scalability, MySQL Edition. This must have been one of the best sessions, ever (mostly because we’ve been giving the exact same advice to our clients for some time now).

This morning started with a keynote from Mårten Mickos (who used to be MySQL’s CEO, but his “job title” must have changed after the acquisition by Sun). His speech was followed by Jonathan Schwartz’s (CEO of Sun) and after that, we heard from Werner Vogels (CTO of Amazon.com). Quite interesting, but I’m not about to repeat everything they’ve said. Instead, I’m linking Colin Charles’s post, Ahead in the Cloud by Verner Vogels.

I’m running to another session now, so… keep tuned: more news will follow!