DBA’s guide to the 2008 MySQL User’s Conference
Well, it’s that time of the year to get excited again! Anyone involved in the MySQL world obviously knows our big User Conference is coming up April 14 – 17 in Santa Clara, and this year Jay Pipes and crew have outdone themselves again by working with our great community, customers, and partners to put together an outstanding series of sessions, tutorials, BOF’s, and more.
As usual, it’s going to be tough to make decisions on which sessions and such to attend, so if you’re a MySQL DBA, Architect, Performance Analyst, or other MySQL sysadmin, I thought I’d try to help and point you to some sessions that I know are going to help you in your DBA job. Rather than break it down by subject matter/discipline like I did last year, I thought I’d work through each day and try and highlight some of the sessions that I don’t think you’re going to want to miss.
Tutorial day
Those of you having or supporting applications that need the utmost in high availability will have a couple of good tutorials to choose from. If you’re considering MySQL Cluster for your applications, then you’ll be hard-pressed to beat Stewart Smith’s Cluster tutorial . If, however, you’re looking to get the most of MySQL’s replication capabilities, then there’s no better person to listen to than the one who oversees MySQL replication, Lars Thalmann, and his replication tutorial.
On a totally different subject, there’s always the religious debate about whether application logic should be embedded in the database or in the application layer. Personally, I’ve seen both be successful in various scenarios. If you’re someone who likes the idea of storing and managing such logic and code in the database, then don’t miss Mariella Di Giacomo’s stored procedure seminar.
Tuesday
Naturally, you’ll want to attend the morning keynotes of Marten Mickos and Jonathan Schwartz to find out the latest on what’s going on with MySQL now that we’re a part of Sun. After that, you’ve got lots to choose from depending on what areas you want to focus.
Since backup and recovery is one of the key disciplines of any database administrator, you should look into the various sessions offered on this topic. To see MySQL’s new backup utility in action, check out one of MySQL’s backup extraordinaire’s (Dr. Chuck Bell) session, and if you’re new to MySQL, then Kai Voigt’s talk on backup and recovery basics is a must-attend. Finally, there’s a good-looking session from Fotolog that concentrates on practical disaster recovery.
Data warehousing specialists will have some very interesting sessions to choose from on Tuesday. There’s a good session on warehouse performance tuning along with strategies and techniques for building terabyte warehouses with MySQL (that includes a cool look at the Infobright storage engine) at an early session that includes yours truly (shameless plug number one).
Rounding out Tuesday for DBA’s is a great session best practices for DBAs by Sherri Kritzer and, to keep you proactively prepared, a look into the crystal ball with respect to what’s coming in the MySQL Server and other related products with this author (shameless plug number two).
Wednesday:
Without question, the early morning keynote on scaling up or out with MySQL is a can’t miss. After that, data warehouse folks will definitely want to check out Kickfire’s session on their new data warehouse solution that’s based on MySQL, and the VLDB session on Petabytes and MySQL.
Those wanting to know more about the new Falcon transaction storage engine should attend Jim Starkey’s (Falcon’s “father”) session that goes into detail about Falcon, including the specific cases where Falcon really shines. Kevin Lewis (Falcon team lead) and Ann Harrison will also host a special session for those wanting to know more about how Falcon compares to InnoDB. Another good storage engine session will be Monty’s talk on the new Maria storage engine that’s essentially crash-proof MyISAM.
Naturally, as a DBA, you’ll want to hit all the good performance tuning sessions, and Jay Pipe/Tobias Asplund never disappoint on this front.
Thursday
More interesting performance-related sessions await you on Thursday. The Fotolog session on optimizing MySQL on Solaris should be a good talk, as will Google’s session on scaling InnoDB, and Flickr’s on scaling MySQL in write-intensive environments. An alternative to Flickr’s session would be ScienceLogic’s talk on Scaling MySQL in the same type of scenario.
And because the number one performance contributor is a proper database design, you don’t want to miss Ron Bradford’s talk on the subject.
Finally, those DBA’s supporting data warehousing apps should check out the data warehouse panel late in the day.
Conclusion
Of course, it’s hard to craft a generic DBA schedule that fits everyone’s needs but the above should help you navigate the waters of the upcoming User Conference. The main thing is make sure you’re registered so if you haven’t done so yet, take care of that today! See you at the show!