Well, "good news everyone". Thanks to Sheeri Cabral of The Pythian Group, PlanetMySQL.org, Jeremy, and, most importantly, LinuxQuestions.org, I am now in possession of a 3-day conference pass!! I'm incredibly excited that I will be able to attend and finally meet many geniuses, including the ones mentioned on my Must-Know People In The MySQL Field page. I've never won anything worth over 50 cents before. As a funny side note, there were 4 pages of replies to the raffle post, 90% of them saying that they could not attend (mostly due to living in other countries), so in reality only 2-3 people out of everyone could actually attend. I like those odds.

Here is a link to the oh so colorful conference schedule. I'm particularly interested in this short list of highly exciting subjects:

April 15th

• State of MySQL – the keynote by Mårten Mickos (former CEO of MySQL).
• Performance Guide for MySQL Cluster – parallel query processing guide perhaps?
• Lessons Learned in Building a Highly Scalable MySQL Database – definitely need more lessons.
• Big Bird (Scaling Twitter) – should be fun, considering I heard twitter was started in ruby on rails and had major problems scaling out.
• InnoDB: Status, Architecture, and New Features – an update would be nice, kthx.
• Dramatically Improving MySQL Database Performance in Data Warehouse Applications – more lessons!
• Investigating Innodb Scalability Limits by Peter Zaitsev from MySQL Performance Blog!
• Disaster is Inevitable—Are You Prepared? by Farhan Mashraqi from Fotolog.
• Mitigating Replication Latency in a Distributed Application Environment – I need to get rid of these constant replication lags already, for the love of god!

April 16th

• Portable Scale-out Benchmarks for MySQL – tasty MySQL bench goodies? Sign me up.
• Applied Partitioning and Scaling Your Database System – sharding, disk spanning? Whatever this will be, I'm all ears.
• Architecture of Maria: A New Storage Engine with a Transactional Design – I'm very interested in this new, very promising future replacement engine for MyISAM.
• Astronomy, Petabytes, and MySQL – sounds like fun. I liked astronomy… I think.
• Benchmarking and Monitoring: Tools of the Trade (Part I) – more tools, invaluable.
• Benchmarking and Monitoring: Tools of the Trade (Part II) – even more? Tool overload for today.

April 17th

• A Match Made in Heaven? The Social Graph and the Database – by Jeff Rothschild from Facebook.com, sounds like something to wake me up in the morning.
• Stored Routines: Tips, Tricks, and Solutions
• MySQL Proxy, the Friendly Man in the Middle – probably one of the most interesting things in development right now.
• Sphinx: High Performance Full Text Search for MySQL
• Helping InnoDB Scale on Servers with Many CPU Cores and Disks – more scaling, always good.
• MySQL Hidden Treasures – man, how do I combine 3 sessions that go on at the same time?
• Top 20 DB Design Tips Every Architect Needs to Know
• Partitioned mySQL and …. realtime – by Dathan Pattishall from Flickr.
• Deadly Sins Using MySQL and PHP – by Arjen Lentz

April 18th

• temporarily unload all the information gathered in the previous 3 days and drown in beer

Excitement is in the air. Can you FEEL IT?

• My MySQL Conference Schedule
• MySQL Conference Liveblogging: Portable Scale-out Benchmarks For MySQL (Wednesday 10:50AM)
• MySQL Conference Liveblogging: Monitoring Tools (Wednesday 5:15PM)
• Must-Know People In The MySQL Field
• MySQL Conference Liveblogging: The Future Of MySQL (Tuesday 11:55AM)