This is my wrapup of the 2007 MySQL conference. If you want to check out the day by day coverage, it's available here: Day One, Day Two, and Day Three.
First of all, I have to thanks Lenz Grimmer for his invitation to dotProject to attend the conference. Without MySQL's willingness to be involved in the community and Lenz's personal efforts, the whole thing would not have been possible.
Second, the conference itself seemed very well organized and kept on schedule. I didn't happen to notice any sessions running particularly late or scheduling mishaps, so that's always good. The single biggest organizational aspect that I did notice were the power strips. When sitting in any of the sessions, I was never more than about five feet from a plug. Combined with my shiny new laptop with a 2.5+ hour battery, I was never without power. Hopefully some of the other conferences will note this… I know some other bloggers noticed.
Finally, one of the most valuable things to me about any of these conferences is the ability to sit down and talk with some of the smartest people out there who are making the decisions and setting the direction of the projects and products I use. Combine this with the “private” information you can end up learning… the number of projects that are still in stealth mode and just on the horizon is exciting and the fact that some of my friends are working on them is even better. I wish them the best.
Now, for the negatives. My first complaint is a bit of an annoyance with myself. I didn't review the schedule prior to getting there on Tuesday, so I missed Guy Kawasaki's keynote. That's hardly a complaint about the conference, but I thought it should be noted.
My biggest single complaint about the conference is the screwy scheduling. There were a number of presentations that would have formed logical progressions… if they weren't out of order and spread over three days. For example, Adam's presentation on scaling MySQL's site or the “7 Stages of Scaling Web Applications” would have each been reasonable “scaling 101” sessions. Then, to follow those presentations with the ones from Digg, Flickr, etc would have made quite a bit of sense and provided an interested attendee with a session track to take them from the basics all the way through rollout. Unfortunately, the scheduling process didn't take this into account and someone attempting to learn the details wouldn't get the full picture until the very end.