Oracle's MySQL Connect 2013 conference summary

Although, hosting the event on a weekend, which is an inconvenience to those who have family, and ignoring the fact that it's Oracle's third MySQL Connect event, I would have to say that this year's Oracle MySQL Connect conference was the best one yet.

This past year, I have been mostly heads-down working at +LinkedIn so I haven't been paying close attention to what Oracle has been doing for +MySQL 5.7 so it was a good educational experience for me, looking at what Oracle's MySQL engineers, in partnership with other engineers from Facebook, Google and Booking.com, have cooked up.

Also, I had enjoyed chatting with past colleagues, particularly +Gerardo Narvaja who has inspired me to try out the community open-source TokuDB for use with OQGraph v3. A few hiccups with building it on my MacOS 10.7 Lion laptop but I was otherwise eventually successful using Apple's toolchain.

I think that the best takeaway of the conference is that, with the exclusion of a Oracle-to-MySQL migration tool, the Oracle MySQL engineering team is busy and actively improving MySQL faster than at any other time during the past 5 years since SUN's acquisition of MySQL. Has Oracle been a better steward for MySQL than SUN? Indeed, without doubt: It is.

That all said, I do have my own personal wish-list for the future, many of them equally apply to the open-source fork, MariaDB.

• I would like an easy email address, a mailing list with a publicly visible archive, where I can fling my open-source patches for inclusion into future MySQL, perhaps both for the current stable (for small patches) and for the next DMR.
• Connector/MXJ, I can compromise - at least reinstate its pages and docs as a 'deprecated' or 'unmaintained' project... or maybe 'maintained by community'.
• InnoDB file-per-schema will be nice. I hear that user-defined table-spaces will be a MySQL 5.7 feature which would satisfy my want.
• InnoDB per-table heuristic for buffer-pool page eviction - some table-spaces may be stored on a faster medium, such as flash or flash-cached disk and so these pages should be eligible for eviction before evicting pages for traditional disk storage.
• Continue to work with Percona to ensure that xtrabackup continues to work.
• Work with community for plugable parsers, stored routines and abstract data types.
• Work with community so that third-party storage engines and plugins are available for official releases as add-on downloads. (Oracle provides no warranty for third-party code, blah, blah, blah).

In summary, it was a good conference with a few minor observations:

• Would be nicer if it wasn't on a weekend due to family.
• 8:30am start on a Sunday? Really?
• Tea/coffee/water at breaks would be appreciated.
• Non-claustrophobic presentation rooms would be nice.
• Better availability of power outlets in presentation rooms would be very nice.
• 4 concurrent tracks would be better.
• Schedule handout did not indicate presenter.
• Schedule handout maps were initially confusing.
• SSH on wifi didn't work on Saturday.