This week is the annual MySQL Conference & Expo in Santa Clara and I'm happy to report that we have hit record numbers with more exhibitors (over 50) and more attendees (over 2,000) than ever before. Monday was primarily tutorials as well as our Customer Advisory Board and partner meetings. Those are great sessions as we get tons of input from bleeding edge customers including some of the world's largest web sit This week is the annual MySQL Conference & Expo in Santa Clara and I’m happy to report that we have hit record numbers with more exhibitors (over 50) and more attendees (over 2,000) than ever before. Monday was primarily tutorials as well as our Customer Advisory Board and partner meetings. Those are great sessions as we get tons of input from bleeding edge customers including some of the world’s largest web sites, retailers, telecommunications customers and software ISVs and OEMs who embed MySQL. It’s a “no BS zone” in that we have product management and lots of developers there to explain what we’re doing and get customers input. We always get good ideas here and get to hear what customers like or dislike about our products and offerings. The big issue is that the large customers are all looking for solutions to help them scale more. We presented some of the ideas under development with the forthcoming Load Balancer as well as some recent results of improvements in InnoDB that help scalability and also some benchmarks on our new Falcon storage engine which has near linear performance on 8-way and 16-way systems. InnoDB also has a new plug-in for MySQL and I’m happy to see that it is published open source under the GPL. And of course, there are also special purpose engines like InfoBright and now KickFire’s appliance for Data Warehousing, and PrimeBase’s engines PBXT and Blob Streaming. I’ll try to post some more information in the next couple of days including some photos and video from Tuesday’s keynotes featuring Marten Mickos, Jonathan Schwartz and Werner Vogels from Amazon, and more details on our latest announcements around MySQL 5.1 (now RC) and MySQL Workbench (now GA). You can read more about the conference with all of the real-time session blogging, news and photos posted on PlanetMySQL and on the conference news page. And for those in the bay area, Sun is sponsoring a party Wednesday evening 8:30pm at the Santa Clara convention center (next to the Hyatt) and it’s open to all… Note: I updated this posting with videos & photos from keynote sessions Tuesday and Wednesday. Open Source