I have arrived in Silicon Valley where I will be spending the next week at the MySQL Conference & Expo 2007. I’m pretty excited about it.

It turns out California is quite a long way from London. After a ten hour flight I caught the big double-decker Caltrain train south along the Bay to Mountain View where I transferred to the Valley Transportation Authority Light Rail. I was soon rolling past the offices of Yahoo, Net App and Lucent, the huge hangars and radar dishes of NASA Ames and Lockheed Martin and the deliciously named Chubby’s Broiler.

The train carried on down W Java Dr and it wasn’t long before I reached the Santa Clara Convention Center and my hotel (the Hilton) directly opposite. My room is pretty nice and from my window I can see the roller coasters of the Great America theme park.

Now I just need to plan what sessions to attend but looking at the schedule I have the usual problem of there only being one of me. Tomorrow is tutorial day and although my registration is sessions-only at the moment, apparently I can upgrade it to the tutorials tomorrow. Unfortunately Scaling and High Availability Architectures is sold out so I might go along to hear about all the new stuff in MySQL 5.1 in the morning.

5.1 has some cool new features like partitioning (which could allow us to eliminate tables split by date in our application) and logs on demand. In fact there is another session just on the new logging capabilities at the conference. Check out this post for some examples of what you can do when the logs are stored in the database itself.

Learning how to write your own storage engine sounds intersting but not something I see myself doing any time soon so I reckon I see how Wikipedia operates in the afternoon.