Sessions of interest in Percona Live 2013

Percona Live 2013 is shortly upon us, and it might be a good idea to watch for what’s ahead of us.

Talks of interest

There is no way I can do justice to all. I wish to point out a small number of sessions I am personally interested in attending. I will not be able to attend them all, since there are too many sessions of interest and too few instances of myself (merely one).

I’ve tried to list some talks which are not absolutely obvious (when Peter Zaitsev speaks of MySQL performance, or Monty speaks about MariaDB, or Robert Hodges or Domas speak about replication — well — you’re certain to have the ins and outs, right?). I can also expect Galera or Percona XtraDB Cluster talks to attract a lot of attention. There is a lot of good content for each.

But I was happy to find some very special talks this year, which are not the “every conference has got to have one talk about this” type. Here’s a hybrid collection of both types.

After constructing the list I’ve intentionally dropped two random sessions. If you are speaking, and not mentioned here, your talk must be one of those two!

• MySQL and Virtualization (Raghavendra Prabhu): I have family ties with KVM. But seriously, a talk which describes the in-depth relationship between KVM and MySQL instances, how to do instrumentation… I’m very interested!
• MySQL Query Anti-Patterns that can be moved to Sphinx (Vladimir Fedorkov): Sphinx can be so much more than just fulltext search. You can throw full blown queries onto your sphinx server, and it can sometimes help you avoid complex table design. I expect this talk to deliver a lot of info about how to do so. As not too many people are intimately familiar with Sphinx, this should be a very good off-your-balance kind of talk when you realize the things you could do with this mature technology.
• MySQL Cluster – When to use it and when not to (Max Mether): I don’t have too much experience with NDB Cluster; and what experience I’ve had is a few years old. I’m happy to learn when NDB is just not for you — I like the idea of setting up the perimeters first, before embarking on a technology.
• Using the Percona Toolkit to detect and even prevent SQL injection attacks (Justin Swanhart): an unusual talk. I’m totally curios to hear this. Be on the watch for Justin’s other talks: quite extraordinary abstracts!
• MySQL administration in Amazon RDS (Ben Black): How many are using RDS? I used it for a short time, and can’t say I had chance to utilize its advantages or get bit by its downsides. Next time I use it, I’d like to be better prepared.
• Practical failover design – automated, semi-automated and manual failover (Yoshinori Matsunobu): failover scenarios and solutions — nothing much to add!
• Rick’s RoTs (Rules of Thumb) (Rick James): good advice on common SQL practice; should be very valuable for developers.
• Introduction to Sharding with Jetpants (Evan Elias): oh I have to see this one. Open source sharding solution? Cloning slaves? Rebalancing shards? Just read the abstract; it is very promising.
• Reddwarf: Database as a Service Openstack project (Patrick Galbraith): have to see this one as well! Oh, darn, two “must see” talks on same time slot! (I actually have this on every time slot this year). Also note Mark Atwood’s talk about RedDwarf, and Patrick’s talk about Chef.

I will probably construct another list for the more obvious talks. Stay tuned!

Trivia: win a free pass

Glad you made it thus far: the first to answer correctly and most comprehensively is to receive a free full conference pass, courtesy Percona.

I’m tempted to ask “what’s in my pocket?”. But he answer must be related to MySQL and I don’t carry RDBMS on me, so I’ll go with:

Who will open your present,

Make you play pleasant,

Tidy your mess,

Do the same for all else?

Be gentle with me, I’m not a professional riddler and English isn’t may main language. I’m not sure if this riddle is ridiculously easy or impractical to answer — so let’s consider this as my first attempt as a rhymer.

If you would benefit from a free ticket — please use the comments below! Note: comments will be hidden for a few hours.

If you only wish to play for the fun of it (maybe you already have a ticket) – just email me at shlomi@[you-know-where-or-just-look-at-the-url-for-this-post].org; I’ll let you know if you are correct, and perhaps publish in comments at a later stage.