I definitely enjoyed the tutorials this year and spent the day doing the Percona XtraDB Cluster training with Jay Janssen from Percona. This was the right kind of format for me and a good pace. I did forget to bring my laptop to that one and ended up building out a three node cluster using a single, remote virtual server from my iPad. Overall, harder, to be sure, but the thrill of setting it up from scratch and keeping up was fun.
Just a few more notable thoughts from the rest of the time...
The Oracle hosted MySQL Community Reception (aka, the 5.6 very post launch party) was a bit lacking in structure, bumpin tunes, free-verse database poetry, or even social interaction. However, the ice-dolphin was a pretty nice touch.
Tuesday morning saw a great keynote by Thomas Ulin of Oracle who did an excellent job of showing why Oracle is bringing a maturity and stability to MySQL which it had not previously seen. I definitely applaud what they are doing there (yes, we all have bugs we wish they'd get around to fixing, but I think that is a different story, personally). To follow-up on that he led an important Birds of a Feather session that evening on 5.6 upgrade experiences and heard many pain points, gripes, and questions. I was quite impressed that he brought a number of key engineers with him and easily took control of the situation, fielding hard questions and then turning to his guys and asking what was being done to address the particular issue, when they expected to have fixes, what the difficulties really were, and what we could all expect. While I'm sure it was less fun to be one of those engineers for that hour this was a major win for transparency and demonstrated a serious commitment to improvement. My hat really goes off to Oracle for trying hard with us as a community (yes, we beggars who use free software are also very choosy). It is also clear that they are basically just nerds like the rest of us. :) This all stood in stark contrast to the session on MariaDB 10.0 with Monty which went into some additional detail, although discovering much it as they went, about their methodology and goals. It is clear that the two camps are diverging at greater rates in most conceivable ways.
Wednesday I attended a talk by Paul Vallee entitled "Mission Critical, not Mission Impossible". This may have been one of the more inspiring talks at the conference on just how much room for improvement there is in the execution portion of IT these days. Eye opener and, hopefully, life changer. I would really like to hear that one again.
Thursday saw some great moment from the Facebook guys on how they manage to run efficiently at scale and also from Jermy Cole and Davi Arnaut on InnoDB file strucutres. A lot of hard work went into that one and it is evident that the Facebook team has done an amazing job at architecting a solid setup that most of us will only really dream about.
At any rate, these are my favorites, the items that really stuck out. Add to that the open-sourcing of the TokuDB engine and the demonstration of how easy things can / should be from Robert Hodges of Continuent and this really was a great place to spend the week.
However... As a nerd who likes his food I really have to take a quick jab at the Hyatt catering team. I do not understand what you folks were doing or thinking with those menus and the dishes served. Sometimes they were ok, mostly they elicited a desire to stoop to eating Taco Bell and if there had been one near I definitely would have done so. There is normal food there as well, I saw it for the other conferences being held in other parts of the center, just not for us. Oh well. Perhaps, I will just brown-bag it next year.
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