Today I attended the MySQL European Customer Conference in London. I was quite excited about it hoping for some good tech sessions and such, especially after seeing the lineup:
- MySQL roadmap
- MySQL performance tuning including real world examples
- MySQL for online applications
- MySQL for data warehousing and bi
- Presentation by the Swedish Police
- Presentation by Net-A-Porter DBA
- High Availability Strategies for MySQL
- Multiplay Telecom Service Architectures with MySQL Cluster Carrier Grade
- Defining an Effective Storage Engine Strategy
Thats a pretty decent line-up, seemed like a lot of solid tech info in there. I chose to attend the MySQL Roadmap, MySQL for online applications, Net-A-Porter, Multiplay Telecom Service Architectures with MySQL Cluster Carrier Grade and Defining an Effective Storage Engine Strategy
The sessions by MySQL employees were good, obviously done by senior sales type guys but all knowledgeable. The sessions were though aimed at tech management types rather than pure tech people, they contained a lot of what can only really be described as sales talk. This held true for the Datawarehousing, Storage Engine and obviously the roadmap talks.
The session on MySQL for online applications could have just been left out really, nothing was really said of any substance, the basic building blocks of a web architecture was mentioned but just not in any sufficient detail.
I found the data warehousing session good as I am currently running into some needs for this kind of application, the roadmap was very helpful if only to show me that some of the much needed improvements is way down the line ๐
I attended the Pret-A-Porter talk as I was hoping to get some insight into the workings of a big MySQL shop. Turns out the DBA who was running the chat was new in the job and can’t really comment on any of the decisions that got them where they are today. He came up with such gems as ‘to me Hibernate is just this horrible little thing the developers use’ and couldn’t really describe why he made some choices like use InnoDB for everything. When asked how he optimised the database he just said he followed the basic recommendation the MySQL Enterprise Monitor suggested, couldn’t really go into any details. In fact he didn’t even know what hardware they run on.
Further I question the choice of partner for this specific presentation, these guys have about 2GB of data and it all fits into the query caches, they have one database server and is considering moving to a DRDB HA cluster, again he can’t really say why thats just what he was told to do. Frankly, running a MySQL server with 2GB data that performs well is no challenge and few people in the industry that actually use MySQL can learn from this presentation.
I chose the Telecoms Strategies talk as it was touching on MySQL Cluster which is something I have read about but never had opportunity to use. The presentation was well rounded, delivered professionally and gave me a lot of insight in the underlying NDB storage engine that enabled MySQL Cluster. The guys focus on talking direct to the NDB using the API rather than SQL so not quite typical but it was really interesting to get a view on the structure of the engine and how it sticks together. It made it crystal clear to me that Cluster would be a engine you would only use in very specific work loads. This was confirmed later on in the conf.
Overall, I feel I didn’t get value for my buck from the conference. Very little that was said had any bearing on my database that is approaching 100GB with 5000 queries per second.
A co-worker attended the performance sessions, he left equally unimpressed. The guys from MySQL Performancing Blog were constantly having to correct the speaker on his points.
So, again, pretty unimpressed. I think I’d need to attend one of the User Conferences which should have a more tech focus at least in parts ๐
