While you can see there are still some “TODO”s, and minor scheduling changes still to go, the overall reviewing process is complete, and the schedule is sound.

The committee has reviewed over 250 submissions in total, sessions and tutorials. It took two months to review the sessions and finalize the schedule. There were very good submissions, and it wasn’t till I started building the schedule that I realized just how many.

You know the feeling: you’re at a conference, and there’s this time slot where you just can’t make up your mind which session to attend. As it turns out, anyway I look at it, I get this at each and every single time slot in this schedule. Hopefully all attendees should feel similarly.

What can you expect to find in the Santa Clara, April conference?

As always, we get variety of topics. First day is tutorials, which I already mentioned, followed by three days of sessions and keynotes.

• Some topics you can guess: always place for good backup practice, performance optimizations for your InnoDB deployment, good indexing strategies and more.
• Open source and emerging technologies are well covered: from Tungsten, Galera/Percona XtraDB Cluster, NDB Cluster to MHA, HAProxy, Hadoop, Percona Toolkit and more.
• MariaDB has good coverage, as well as Percona Server.
• Scale topics such as sharding, building large deployments,Big Data.
• Cloud is well represented, too. Deployments on Amazon, Google Cloud, OpenStack, SkySQL Cloud Data Suite; interesting content on virtualization.
• Optimizer, better queries, query evaluation plans.
• Replication, of course, is as always a hot topic, this year in particular due to anticipated 5.6 release
• Speaking of 5.6, a lot of content on that, too. PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA, InnoDB, partitions, GIS and more…
• Case studies: can you do without them? Get to hear how big companies used product/project X, what it took to make it work, how it helped them grow.
• Chance to get up to speed on third party solutions: Akiban, Tokutek, ScaleDB…
• Hardware: SSDs are all the rage. How do you nest choose and configure your hardware and deployment?
• Best practices, security, monitoring, NoSQL…
• And, I can’t list everything, but a LOT of good, unique content!

I will write some more on specific sessions I find that are of unique interest.

Finally, this is my first time acting as committee chairman, and so much of this work was new to me, and I got to learn it on the fly. Thankfully, the committee is composed of experienced conference veterans, not to mention experts, who gave good advice. I was happy to ask for their advice and happy to accept. I wish to thank the committee members for their kindness and openness! (That doesn’t mean I’m buying you all your beer though!)

Call for Papers

Call for papers is extended until Oct 31st. We’ve already received a good number of submissions, but wish to provide with another chance for latecomers. Now is a good time to submit!

The committee will begin the long reviewing process shortly.

Committee

Members of the reviewing committee are:

• Roland Bouman (Pentaho)
• Ronald Bradford (Continuent)
• Laine Campbell (PalominoDB)
• Colin Charles (MontyProgram)
• Jeremey Cole (Twitter)
• Patrick Galbraith (HP)
• Henrik Ingo (Nokia)
• Jay Janssen (Percona)
• Giuseppe Maxia (Continuent)
• Domas Mituzas (Facebook)
• Ivan Zoratti (SkySQL)

The committee is charged with reviewing submitted papers so as to make sure we pick great talks for this conference and have a balanced and appealing schedule for any attendee. These people are about to spend a good deal of their private time on this, and much of the conference’s success will be their own!

Papers

If you’re still about to submit, then please review these guidelines from previous conferences as for how to best get your paper accepted: [1], [2], [3]

Remember the best guideline the committee has, when evaluating your talk, is your submission. Who you are or the company you work for do not make for an accepted paper.

We may ask for clarifications, or suggest that you rewrite parts of your submission, so please be attentive. But it is absolutely best if your paper is well drafted on submission (BTW, you can edit your submission right now before the committee begins its reviews).

The session/tutorial tracks are: Developing Applications, Database Administration, Trends in Architecture and Design, Tools, Utilizing Hardware, New Features, Best Practices for Businesses, Replication and High Availability Strategies. If you’re not sure where your submission fits in, please add a private note. The committee may choose to pick the most suitable track for you.

See you at the conference!