It is exciting to be here, meeting again old friends and ex colleagues, but also exciting for what seems the start of a very significant conference fro MySQL.

I really enjoy the introductions done from Edward Screven and Thomas Ulin.

Edward highlight the fact that MySQL is increasing his presence in the market and in the community.

This could be also thanks to the unbelievable effort done by Oracle in keeping his production cycle on target.

That part was really stress and well describe by Thomas, who show where the focus of Oracle is, mainly on InnoDB, with implementation and enhancement of the internal contentions, then on Optimizer improvements and NoSQL integration.

Replication remain a pending issue from my side because also if we will have the global transaction ID, we will still suffer for delay in replication given that parallel replication is till working by, Schema and not per transaction.

So yes better, as announced and expected but still far from what is a health and efficient state of art.

What I saw interesting here are a couple of additional announcement, which seems not to be so relevant but the facto are crucial for few customers.

Audit interface is one of the key missed feature in the past, yes indeed the API was there in 5.5 but, not a ready to go product.

Also security enforcement was not so efficient but in 5.6 it was redesign and be much more effective.

Then something that brings me back of 5 years ago, the return of DRBD. I have being working on it, from long time. I was using it on several customer but, still I was not happy and customer wan to as well, of having this approach of Primary/Secondary where the Secondary was mainly a full set of hardware completely useless.

There was the DRBD solution to have it solve but I have never see it really in place efficiently. I am also not sure about the usage of Peacemaker, which add so much complexity to a HA solution that could make working under pressure and emergency, a real nightmare.

Information about the MySQL new utilities is more then interesting it is a must to investigate. Specially we have to pay attention to few packages like the MySQL Migration tool, when I did the Oracle to MySQL migration at the United Nations in 2006, I had the chance to work on it and to do a lot of expansion to the code itself. In that context it was working great, and it was a shame that the product remain there without further improvement. Having it revive is great just I hope it will be still possible to improve/customize as I was abe to do it in 2006.

My feeling is that this will be an amazing conference, really focus on what customer need, and I feel to be in a privileged position, given that working in Pythian I have a visibility of customers issue, different approach and causalities that no one else have, that in combination with our experience and knowledge in other technology gives us and me the real freedom to be objective in choosing the right tool for the job, in relation to customer needs.

Really excite and ready to go through the most session I will be able to.