Sebastian Bergmann

Once again I spent a week in the San Francisco Bay Area. This time around it was for LugRadio Live USA 2008 and the MySQL Conference & Expo 2008.

I flew in on April 12 (from FRA via LAX to SJC) and arrived in the hotel, the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara, in the afternoon.

The next morning I left the hotel around 7:00 in the morning for a genuine experience of what they call public transportation in the bay area. It took me three hours to travel the distance of about 40 miles from Santa Clara to downtown San Francisco:

• Santa Clara VTA Light Rail from Santa Clara to Mountain View
• Caltrain from Mountain View to Millbrae
• BART from Millbrae to Powell Street

The most frustrating part of this experience was the fact that you buy separate tickets for each leg of the trip as the trains are operated by different carriers and that there is no integrated timetable online.

At LugRadio Live USA 2008 I attended the following sessions:

• Christian Hammond on Review Board
• Allison Randal on Parrot
• Matthew Walster on the demoscene

I also got to talk briefly to Jono Bacon and Allison Randal before I had to start the three hour trip back to Santa Clara.

I got back to Santa Clara in time for the MySQL Community Dinner that was initated by Arjen Lentz.

Unlike with the PHP-focussed conferences that I usually present at, I managed to attend a session in almost every timeslot (each of which had 8 sessions to choose from) at the MySQL Conference & Expo 2008.

• Monday
  • MySQL Proxy: The Complete Tutorial
• Tuesday
  • State of MySQL
  • Open Source: The Heart of the Network Economy
  • The Lost Art of the Self Join
  • InnoDB: Status, Architecture, and New Features
  • Investigating InnoDB Scalability Limits
• Wednesday
  • Copyright Regime vs. Civil Liberties
  • Scaling MySQL - Up or Out?
  • MySQL Sandbox
  • Falcon from the Beginning
  • Architecture of Maria
  • Extending MySQL
• Thursday
  • Who is the Dick on my site?
  • The Social Graph and the Database
  • Agile Methods to Support Massive Growth
  • Helping InnoDB Scale on Servers with Many CPU Cores and Disks
  • Deadly Sins Using MySQL and PHP

I had a great time at the conference. I met a lot of nice people, had plenty of interesting discussions, and I learned a lot in the sessions.