Experiences at GNUnify presenting Papers on MySQL

GNUnify is one of the major annual FOSS events here in India. Organised by the students of Symbiosis Institute for Computer Science & Research and the Pune Linux Users Group (PLUG), GNUnify is an event of consequence in the Indian FOSS ecosystem. This year, the conefrence took place on Feb 19th and 20th in the wonderful city of Pune.

I submitted two papers on MySQL and fortunately both of them were selected. Thanks to the organising team, who were helpful enough to schedule both sessions on the second day on request, since I would not have been able to make it on the first day. But more of that later. Let me recount the experience of GNUnify 2010.

The conference was very well organised. The students took good care of everything at the conference. There was not a single issue that would need any resolution. Team GNUnify, Great Job! Yes, the shceduling of the events on the second day was a bit loose, and it was mostly a student crowd but that is more about how Pune is.

I gave two presentations at the conference. One on MySQL Performance Tuning best practices and one on MySQL Stored Procedures. Both the presentations were very well recieved by the audience. In the first session, I walked the participants through the best practices of setting up MySQL and optimising it. In the MySQL Stored Procedures session I focussed on how we can achieve MySQL Optimisation by writing routine processes as stored procesdures.

I am including both my presentations below:

MySQL Performance Tuning - GNUnify 2010

MySQL Stored Procedures: Building High Performance Web Applications

I am still waiting for the videos and images to come out, once they do I will update this post and add them here as well.

It was also a wonderful experience to meet other FOSS enthusiasts and speakers at the conference, and the students. The Mozilla team was also present at the event all gung-ho! It was fun to interact with Arun and Seth. Discussions with Shantanu about MySQL Replication and Shell Scripting were very interesting and refreshing. But for me the best was the discussion I had with Venkat on Collaborative Innovation. He also made a very interesting presentation on the same - was not to be missed. Vivek Khurana and Abhishek Nagar did a good job or keeping things in sync at the conference, Kudos to them.

I am looking forward to the next GNUnify and hoping for a bigger participation from OSSCube then.