Conferences

Last week was a huge week for PalominoDB.  I will admit to being cautiously optimistic about Percona taking over this conference - one of the biggest parts of the year for the MySQL community.  That being said, the conference was done quite well.  I really applaud Percona for making it happen.  In particular, the dot org pavillion was an excellent addition.  While I was stuck at the booth most of the event, I had a great view for the sheer variety of attendees coming through, and had the privilege of participating in a number of excellent conversations.

I noticed a number of patterns that seemed to prevail among the conversations.  Folks seem eager to move on to MySQL 5.5, finally comfortable with its stability.  Administrators are eager to learn more about MariaDB and Drizzle, and how they can differentiate themselves from the Oracle variants.  Partitioning is more prevalent as datasets grow, and sharding is becoming almost commonplace.  Now the focus is more on the challenging questions around HA - multi-master, synchronous replication and multi-datacenter installations.  People seem more interested in commercial additions around the MySQL ecosystem such as Tungsten, TokuDB, ScaleArc, Scalebase and Clustrix.  

René Cannao, one of our senior administrators did a great tutorial on understanding performance through measurement, benchmarking and profiling.  Feedback has been great, and we look forward to continuing to evolve our benchmarking and profiling methods.  Please keep an eye out.

Additionally, we were able to announce a very exciting partnership with SkySQL.  PalominoDB focuses on operational excellence by providing top DBAs to our clients.  We dig in to our clients' architectures and improve them, maintain them and help redesign them as they grow.  Our oncall services are top notch, regularly answering pages in under 5 minutes - and always providing a talented and experienced DBA on the other end of the phone.  What we don't do is software support.  It's just not our experience.  We can tune it, run it and grow it, but for clients who need to dig into code, fix bugs and really provide deep internals knowledge in MySQL - SkySQL are who we turn to.   We are also quite excited to help augment SkySQL's excellent services with our own - to create some of the happiest customers out there.

We are thrilled to see our partnership ecosystem grow, our service offerings expand and knowledge of our brand and the quality of services continue to improve.  I can't help but glow with pride at the reputation PalominoDB has built - through our DBAs, our clients and our partners.  Being a part of the MySQL  conference and expo only cemented this pride in community, and pride in our work.  Thank you to everyone who has helped us get there.

Thank you all of you!

The New England Database Summit is an all day conference-style event where participants from the research community and industry in the New England area can come together to present ideas and discuss their research and experiences working with on data-related problems.  It is an academic conference with applications to real life, and includes any type of database.

The 5th annual NEDB will be held in Cambridge, MA MIT (in 32-123) on Friday, February 3, 2012.  Anyone who would like is welcome to present a poster (registration required), or submit a short paper for review.  We plan to accept 8--10 papers for presentation (15 minutes) at the meeting.   All posters will be accepted.

For more details, and to register and / or upload a paper, see:

http://db.csail.mit.edu/nedbday12/

(Tune in tomorrow where I tell you how you can win USD$100, like I did last week!)

Not signed up for Percona Live:London and need some motivation to do so?  How about a £40.00 discount?  That means the Expo Hall is free, regular registration is £260.00 and the tutorials + conference price is £500.00.  Use discount code "PDBUK".

In just 3 weeks, RightScale is having a cloud conference in Santa Clara, CA Nov 8-9.  There is a Zero-to-cloud training on Tuesday, November 8th, and you can get a 25% discount on the training by using code "RSCONF25".

RightScale and Eucalyptus are teaming up to provide a training, too -- on Thursday, November 10th.  If the name Eucalyptus sounds familiar, it is because former MySQL employees Mårten Mickos and Mark Atwood work there.  There is a 25% discount off that training by using code "RSEUCT25".

PalominoDB is very excited about our participation in the upcoming PerconaLive conference in London.  We'll have two of our European staff presenting.  On Monday, Jonathan Levin will be doing a tutorial on Advanced MySQL Scaling Strategies for Developers, and on Tuesday Rene Cannao will be presenting on MySQL Backup and Recovery Tools and Techniques.  Rene and Jonathan are two of our newer team members, and represent an exciting growth in staff outside of the US; Jonathan being in the UK and Rene being in Malta.  I know I'm thrilled to get out to London to meet a lot of new folks in our community.

We did get a chance to present at PerconaLive in NYC this year as well, which was quite a lot of fun, and the positive reception Sheeri's session got was gratifying.  Percona has become a huge part of our community and has provided great value in their information share, tools, services and now conferences - including the MySQL Conference & Expo 2012.  Having been involved in professional MySQL consulting and remote support for four years has been quite the adventure, and the fact that so many companies find space to create, share and prosper only shows the viability of open source software and the communities behind it.  

I know we at PalominoDB are quite proud to share space with companies such as Pythian, Blue Gecko, SkySQL and, of course, Percona. We are proud to support open source solutions across the board, and are even more excited to have grown to a place where we have the resources to contribute back to them, to non-profits and to the growth of our clients and every person on our team.  Here's to an exciting and brilliant future, and a great conference!