This was the first time I attended the MySQL conference as an end user of MySQL, rather than selling something to someone. It gave a different perspective as I was mostly interested in learning how to solve my own problems, rather than someone else's problems. The conference catered to that need very well!

Below, links are generally to the O'Reilly page that contains a PDF or PPT file of the slides. Keynote and Ignite talks contain video. The 2 first ones are the most important and will already take you a long way in becoming a MySQL ninja!

MySQL administration, tuning and architecture

Confuse of Dev or Ops? Simple rule: if you are praise for Web site success, you are Dev; if you are blame when Web site down, you are Ops.

This year was the first year the public could nominate candidates for these awards. We got in many nominations and this really helped the panel to get an overview of everything that is noteworthy in the MySQL ecosystem right now. Thank you to everyone who participated by sending in nominations.

In the first category the panel received and debated over a dozen suggestions. There are so many great people in this community, it is easy to think of people who truly deserve to be awarded. There were however two persons who clearly stood out with a track record of years and years of broad and really key contributions to the MySQL community. These two persons also clearly stood out both in number of nominations and number of votes. Therefore, the...

It's now 2 hours until I depart for San Francisco and then Santa Clara for this year's MySQL Conference. Can't wait to meet everyone and to learn about cool new things (2 solutions for parallelizing replication, Drizzle, Xtrabackup...)

This year I am involved in two BoF sessions: Severalnines ClusterControl with Johan Anderson and Xtrabackup Manager with Lachlan Mulcahy. Both of these are about brand new topics, this being the first time they are presented, so I'm excited to be working with these guys.

Jonathan Levin has an excellent blog post titled How to make MySQL cool again. It is almost word for word something I've wanted to write for a long time. Now I don't need to, thanks Jonathan.

Once again Blogger failed to post my comments to his site, so I will make some comments as a new post of my own instead. Jonathan actually lists things that exist already but isn't getting used enough. My list contains also a few things that I don't know if they exist or not.

Hi Jonathan

This is just a friendly reminder that you can nominate your favorite MySQL community member, application and company for the traditional awards. The nominations must be in by the end of this week, after which the panel votes on them:

https://openlife.cc/blogs/2011/march/call-nominations-2011-oreilly-mysq…

I've seen at least a few people on IRC that were thinking of sending in nominations, now is a good time to do it!

The address is mysql.awards [at] gmail.com

There has been an increase in the discussion about MySQL replication and how to make it happen faster. I don't think Marco Tusa's blog is on Planet MySQL, so let's highlight it first: A dream on MySQL parallel replication. This is a good account of what it looks like out in the field of MySQL databases today - you are increasingly aware of replication, fearing it will be a bottleneck you cannot fix.

The headline above could fit in a tweet, but Drizzle making its first release almost 3 years after the project started deserves a blog post.

Brian Aker has a long blog post looking back at these 3 years (and even longer into MySQL history). Stewart Smith has an entertaining personal perspective. .frm files, I will not miss you (if I were to start using Drizzle, that is). Planet Drizzle has an avalanche of posts from most Drizzle devs celebrating this event.

I finally did the migration to Drupal 7 for the Footnotes module this weekend. See Release notes and project page for more information.

With this release I also announced my intent to hand over the module to a new maintainer. Since I'm now increasingly active with affairs in the MySQL community, both hacking as well as other community tasks, it is prudent to not let old projects dangle without attention but to formally hand them over to fresh minds.