From Behind The Ash Curtain

Like many other MySQL conference visitors, also Codership team was stranded in bay area due to the volcano eruption in Iceland. For us however, the extra time in silicon valley was not an issue, as we were working on local assignments anyways, and staying local enabled us to work really focused during this period.

Also the "evacuation" from SFO worked out really well for us, thanks to KLM and Air France. We just visited SFO on Thursday (22) and got flights for the next morning. I actually got two bookings, which was a little embarrassing. There were many empty seats and especially the CDG-HEL leg was practically empty. Ash refugees had already left by train, I guess.
The return from SFO happened somewhat too early for us, as we had holiday plans for the forthcoming weekend, and we had to cancel the fun part. So this trip ended up as all work and no joy for us...

The conference itself, was fun and very interesting. We were busy first to prepare our presentation, then giving the presentation and finally sorting out mis-conceptions caused by the presentation. But it was fun altogether, and Galera got a lot attention there. We had many interesting conversations of Galera and replication strategies in general.
To my disappointment, the expo hall was half empty, I'm not sure if this can be profitable and it makes me wonder of the future of this conference.

On Fri 16th, there were both Drizzle and MariaDB conferences, which we planned to visit but were too busy to catch. We wanted to sort out the differences between the Drizzle replication API and wsrep API in very detail, but this work must be postponed a little.
We, however, entered MariaDB conference just when they were closing, and hooked into short replication discussion with Kristian Nielsen, Sergei Golubchik and Paul McCullagh. MontyProgram is driving the Replication API design and implementation and we don't need to work inside MariaDB code base. Codership will just provide Galera plugin for the end solution.

Paul brought to my attention an interesting fact about PBXT: rollback is low effort operation with PBXT. This is very favorable for Galera replication (and optimistic concurrency control in general). Odds are that PBXT will scale better in Galera cluster, even with hot spot work loads.

Slides of our presentation are available here: http://en.oreilly.com/mysql2010/public/schedule/detail/13286