Listening and learning

Warning/Disclaimer. I'm an old friend of the MySQL management team and an advisor to their company so I'm not disinterested. I'm sitting here right now in the tutorials section listening with interest to the questions. The audience is pretty fragmented between those who know more about databases than is good for them (they ask questions like do you have mutatable triggers) and those that backed into this from Php/Java programming who seem slightly bemused at the concept of recursion. The session on the new forthcoming features (Triggers, Stored Procedures, Views) was oversold as was the one I'm not in which is on performance optimization. I plan to say some pretty radical Googlish things about optimization when I talk at this conference on Thursday. I'll probably be stoned or heckled at the end of the talk so I'm planning a quick exit back to the Googleplex. Why? Because right now judging by the attendence in these tutorials everyone wants MySQL to be more like Oracle (or to understand it better) and I'm a well known fan of less is more, simpler is better, pick your platitude of choice.