Velocity Conference -- Web Performance and Operations Conference

I just made my reservations to attend Velocity Conference in Burlingame, CA. Velocity is a new two day conference being organized by O'Reilly. I was happy to learn at Lunch today that one of my good friends from CafeMom will also be attending. Over at Facebook I see Don McAskill has RSVP'd for the event as well.

Jesse Robbins, chair for Velocity conference graciously provided a 20% discount coupon as a comment on my blog post.

The early registration is about to end, but I find it really interesting that many slots still mention TBC (to be confirmed). I would have expected the schedule to be fully determined by now, however, I still believe this should be a great conference to attend.

Earlier I wrote about my proposed session being rejected at Velocity Conference which was a big disappointment especially since my presentation was about a top 13 website in the world. Wasn't that the point of this conference to begin with? There are several sessions at this conference that have been presented several times at other conferences including MySQL and a little Google search turns up the slides. So some company's 'secret sauce' is worth repeating and others not? Oh well, no hard feelings. As I said, I still think there would be some interesting sessions.

Let me know if you are planning to attend the conference. I will be flying to SFO on Sunday evening and flying back on Wednesday afternoon.

Velocity Conference

O'Reilly's Velocity Conference is happening this year from June 23-24 at Burlingame, CA. Velocity site describes this new conference as:

"Web companies, big and small, face many of the same challenges: sites must be faster, infrastructure needs to scale, and everything must be available to customers at all times, no matter what. Velocity is the place to obtain the crucial skills and knowledge to build successful web sites that are fast, scalable, resilient, and highly available."

When the call for papers was open for Velocity, I submitted a talk proposal regarding cutting MySQL IO for cost effective scaling and performance optimization.

Fotolog is one of the largest sites on the Internet. We are ranked 13th most visited site by Alexa and 3rd most active social network by ComScore. In the past two years, we have experienced and continue to experience incredible growth. By focusing on efficient data modeling and cutting I/O, we have literally pushed the limits of optimization and scalability when it comes to MySQL.

Learning today that my session was not accepted obviously came as a major disappointment to me. While I truly respect the conference chair's decision, I believe my session would have been useful for those who are experiencing strong growth but cannot afford to re-architect their database backend for one reason or another.

There is some good news as well: While Velocity rejected my proposal, I am presenting a somewhat similar session at this year's MySQL Conference. The session is called "Optimizing MySQL and InnoDB on Solaris 10 for World's Largest Photo Blogging Community". If you're attending the conference and interested in knowing how you can push the limits of your MySQL database servers on Solaris, don't forget to attend my session. It will be a lot of fun, I promise!

I am also presenting two more talks at the MySQL Conference, Disaster is Inevitable—Are You Prepared? and The Power of Lucene.