All of us here at Percona warmly invite you to Percona Performance Conference 2009 on April 22 and 23, 2009 in the Hyatt Regency in Santa Clara, California. The theme for the conference is Performance Is Everything. This conference is about application performance overall, not just databases. Attendance is free of charge for everyone. Experts in many types of technologies — databases, search, cloud computing, massively parallel computing, client-side optimization — will present their real-life experience.
In order to forestall speculations and prevent people from jumping to unwarranted negative conclusions, I’d like to take a moment and explain the story behind this event. Some of you have noticed that there were no sessions from Percona this year on the schedule for the 2009 MySQL Conference and Expo. This is not because we didn’t propose any sessions this year; Peter, Vadim, and the rest of us at Percona submitted over a dozen session proposals, which were initially declined. As a result, we conceived and organized another conference. We reserved a hotel near the MySQL conference, planned the event, invited speakers, etc. Then O’Reilly and MySQL graciously and unexpectedly proposed that we bring our conference into the Hyatt and present it in the same venue with the MySQL conference (official announcement from Kaj). They also accepted three of our original session proposals into the MySQL conference. We appreciated this fair and generous gesture and accepted their offer. We will be participating in all aspects of the conference, including the community events such as the dot-org pavilion and the MySQL Camp that Sheeri Kritzer Cabral is organizing.
That’s the back story — now on to the Percona Performance Conference! This is not “another MySQL conference.” It’s a performance conference. It’s true that we are among the world’s foremost experts on MySQL, InnoDB, and XtraDB, and it’s true that the database is usually harder to scale than other components in an application. But ultimately you don’t only care that your database is fast — you care that your application is fast as a whole. That’s why we’ll have sessions from experts on many aspects of high-performance applications, not just the database component. And we’ll have experts on different databases too.
This is a technical event that’s free to attend even if you’re not attending the MySQL conference. We expect to see a lot of people who live locally, and we know that the easy accessibility for attendees of the MySQL Conference and Expo will add value to their trip to Santa Clara.
We will not be the only ones speaking at Percona Performance Conference; other experts will join us in making presentations too. You’ll be able to hear sessions from such luminaries as Monty Widenius (creator of MySQL), Brian Aker (creator of Drizzle), Andrew Aksyonoff (creator of Sphinx), Mark Callaghan (database guru at Google), and many others. If you’d like to propose a session, please do so through the Percona Performance Conference website.
The Percona team looks forward to greeting you face to face this April in Santa Clara.
The conference idea sounds pretty cool. Good luck.
This is great. Oh, and get Domas to give a talk on the Wikipedia setup.
This is awesome news.
My excitement at getting my proposal approved for the MySQL conference was dulled when I noticed that the excellent company I expected to be with wasn’t actually going to be there. I’m not saying that the current list of speakers isn’t great – it is. But there were several respected names that were definitely missing. It was these names and their presentations that I’ve followed and that fed into my desire to be part of the conference in the first place.
Then as I was planning which sessions to attend, I really didn’t see anything that interested me personally. I was actually thinking about just leaving the conference right after my presentation.
With the Percona announcement though, I’m rethinking things. It looks like there will be some interesting topics on Wednesday and Thursday afterall.
I wish I had something else to propose, but it seems that I am a one-trick pony. And with respect to performance, I’m afraid I can only learn. At least now there is a whole set of presentations geared just to that purpose.
People, try to organize conferences sometimes in Europe, especially Baltic’s. We always miss the fun, only thing we have is Barcamp Baltics :/
This is a great news for all performance and scalability geeks. Good luck