Am now back from Percona Live, London. Here are some quick impressions of mine.
The physical location of the conference was excellent, not far from Tower Bridge. The conference area itself was nice and has good atmosphere. Very well organized. Kudos to Percona!
Theme
The official theme for the conference was “Discover the Power of MySQL”. However, looking back at the conference, I think the de-facto theme was “High Availability and Scale Out for MySQL”.
Why do I say that? Look at the sponsors of the event; look at the talks. There were talks by and about Clustrix, Tungsten (parallel replication), Schooner, Choosing a HA solution (by Henrik), Fusion-IO, MySQL Cluster, MySQL in the Cloud, Galera Replication, Scalebase, Spider, MHA, Various HA Solutions (by Oli Sennhauser)…
There were other talks, about all sorts of things. But to me it seemed like scale-out was the big thing, and HA the next one. Especially looking at sponsors booths it looked that way.
People
Of course, it’s no secret that meeting the people is a great fun. I met with familiar faces, and was happy to meet new ones. It’s great to just discuss stuff with people, share opinions.
The after party was fun, and well organized. Kudos to Clustrix who sponsored it!
Business talk
I wasn’t at the conference to sell anything myself, and so was on a relaxed mood. I was happy that whatever sales talk I shared, heard or overheard was highly technical and very open. It was also good to openly discuss possible relationships.
I was in particular pleased to see the popularity some of my tools and ideas were gaining. I could recognize at least two talks where my tools were mentioned; I was delighted to talk to DBAs telling me they were using openark-kit in general, oak-online-alter-table in particular, or some SQL solutions and tricks I offered in my blog. This is really wonderful! To write something having people use it to their benefit — I suppose this is what open source aspires to. It’s great to hear feedback, and better yet to get good feedback.
I also had the pleasure of meeting people after hours, and have good discussions, not necessarily MySQL related.
To top it all, I had free time on Wednesday, where I had a superior visit to the Natural History Museum, which left me in awe.