I’m speaking at the MySQL conference in April

It might surprise you to hear this, but I had no idea whether my talks would be accepted. The committee decided on that, and neither I nor anyone else at Percona is on the committee. In any case, I’ll be giving some tutorials again this year, and two of my talks have been accepted: Measuring Scalability and Performance With TCP and Diagnosing intermittent performance problems.

This seems like an appropriate place to mention a few words about the conference organization. The number of people involved is staggering (100+). The logistics — the number of tasks, vendors, contracts, and so on — blows the mind. The upfront cost is literally unmentionable. It’s an exponentially bigger deal in every way than any of the conferences we’ve done before. There is no way to explain it to anyone who isn’t involved. I don’t even comprehend it myself.

Despite this, we are working hard to ensure that the traditions we’ve known and loved for years are continued. It turns out that they all have a very high cost in real dollars. We are constantly faced with hard decisions that always involve “how are we going to pay for this?” I wish that, for example, it could be simple and lightweight to organize BOFs. But there are unions and contracts and room minimums and overtime pay and bundled quotes and restrictions every which way. Nothing is simple, nothing is easy, nothing is cheap — regardless of how simple, easy, and cheap it should be.

And yet, there will be BOFs and dot-org booths and Drizzle Day and all the rest. And the ticket price is a lot less than it was last year. If you appreciate this, you can help by getting attendees to come. Please promote the conference to everyone you know, in every way you know. Use Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, everything. Blog about it. Mention it in-person. Ask your boss to send you and your colleagues, or send your team if you’re the boss. Send email to your meetups and user groups and mailing lists, and ask them to promote it to their networks too. Enough said.

Further Reading:

• There will be an O’Reilly MySQL Conference in April 2010
• I’ll be speaking at the O’Reilly MySQL Conference 2010
• Speaking at EdUI Conference 2009
• The MySQL Conference will be very good this year
• Postgres folks, consider the 2011 MySQL conference