Pythian Group

The MySQL track at Kaleidoscope in Washington, DC during June 28-July 1st is set! Here is the schedule, Lincoln VI is the MySQL track room.

Ronald has done a super job and spent a ton of hours in the past several weeks coordinating this effort. Work has kept me much busier than normal, but I have lent some time to the coordination as well. It is a credit mostly to Ronald that we have been able to plan an entire 19-session conference track, complete with confirming speakers, in less than a month. (You may notice the schedule does not have all 19 sessions full, we are just waiting for some more speakers to confirm details.)

Whether or not you made it to last month’s O’Reilly MySQL User Conference & Expo, and whether you are an expert or casual user, the sessions at Kaleidoscope will teach you new and exciting things. This is a credit to the planning we did (and again, Ronald spent the lion’s share of time on this) — we did not just want to re-do the same content from the April conference, and we wanted something that would be accessible to developers and DBAs who know what they’re doing when it comes to writing SQL queries, but may or may not know how MySQL itself works.

I will definitely be giving away copies of my book, The MySQL Administrator’s Bible, and Ronald will be giving away copies of his new book, Expert PHP and MySQL, so the conference is definitely not-to-be-missed!

It’s not too late to register for Kaleidoscope – be sure to use the discount code MYSQL to save $300 off your registration (assuming you are not a member of ODTUG).

On Monday, Ronald Bradford posted that the independent Oracle Developer Tools User Group had opened up their Kaleidoscope Conference, well-known throughout the Oracle community for in-depth technical sessions for developers, to the MySQL community. Giuseppe Maxia posted his thoughts on Tuesday.

We have confirmed that there will be an entire MySQL track at Kaleidoscope! Because Kaleidoscope is less than 8 weeks away, we could not go through a standard call for papers. Ronald and I have been working to come up with appropriate topics and speakers for an audience that uses MySQL but is probably more familiar with Oracle. We contacted folks we thought would be interested, and who we thought could make it logistically, as the conference is in Washington, D.C.

We have (almost) finalized the list of speakers; the session abstracts will be finalized in the next few days. You can see the speakers at Kaleidoscope’s MySQL page, but I’ve also listed them below (alpha by last name):

Philip Antoniades, Sun/MySQL
Ronald Bradford, 42SQL
Sheeri K. Cabral, The Pythian Group
Laine Campbell, PalominoDB
Patrick Galbraith, Northscale
Sarah Novotny, Blue Gecko
Padraig O’Sullivan, Akiba Technologies Inc.
Jay Pipes, Rackspace Cloud
Dossy Shiobara, Panoptic.com
Matt Yonkovit, Percona

There are one or two more speakers we are waiting to hear back from. There will be 19 sessions, so some speakers will have more than one session.

I am very excited that MySQL has its own track at Kaleidoscope. In addition, Ronald and I will be able to attend our very first event as Oracle ACE Directors – the Sundown Sessions are a Birds-of-a-Feather-type discussion, with the Oracle ACE Directors being the panelists and the community asking questions. Immediately after the Sundown Sessions is a “Meet the Oracle ACE” event, the only part of the conference officially sponsored by Oracle.