MySQL & Heatwave Summit Recap
Last week, I had the chance to attend the MySQL & HeatWave Summit, where I also got to talk about Readyset. It was a jam-packed two days, full of back-to-back sessions focused on MySQL HeatWave and Enterprise features. Alongside all the technical deep dives, there were also great Community talks showcasing some of the largest MySQL deployments out there. Tons of learning, lots of interesting conversations — overall, a fantastic event!
Opening Keynote
The first day kicked off with an opening keynote from Wim Coekaerts, where he walked us through everything new since last year’s event. One thing that really caught my attention was the announcement of a new feature in MySQL — and even some changes at the Linux kernel level — that will allow MySQL to write pages back to the filesystem using InnoDB page sizes. This could make it possible to disable the Double Write Buffer entirely. There weren’t a lot of details shared yet, but it sounds like Oracle will be making a formal announcement about it in an upcoming release. Definitely something to keep an eye on!
Another highlight from the keynote? Our event made it onto the big screen! — More details https://anotherboringtechblog.com/2025/04/mysql-brazil-meetup-2025/
Readyset had a featured talk in the second slot on day one — during this session, Gautam (Readyset’s CEO) and I walked through why having a caching strategy is critical to complement your database. We also showed a live demo of Readyset hitting 25K QPS on a single CPU core, with an impressive 25 microseconds of latency. Super exciting to share that performance live!
Later, Alexander Martinez from Yelp gave a great talk on their journey upgrading MySQL to version 8.0. He dove into the steps they took and some of the challenges they hit along the way — including a few surprises caused by Percona XtraBackup defaults like lock-ddl and safe-slave-updates being enabled by default. Funny enough, I might know who was responsible for turning those defaults on back in the day! :P
Norvald Ryeng from Oracle followed up with an awesome deep dive into the MySQL Optimizer. He explained the challenges and limitations of the current design, and how a new optimizer architecture is being developed to fix those issues. Since the optimizer is the brain making decisions like join order planning during query execution, it needs to be both fast and smart — definitely a critical area of improvement.
Daniel Van Eeden from PingCAP gave a talk about the go-mysql library, covering the defaults around replication streams and sharing some interesting insights into the MySQL wire protocol — lots of good low-level details there.
Finally, Raja Sriram Ganesan from Uber shared how they handle primary cluster promotions during failovers. It’s always fascinating to hear how companies operating at Uber’s scale deal with these complex infrastructure challenges.
To kick off the second day of talks, René Cannaò — CEO of ProxySQL — gave a great session on how ProxySQL can take your MySQL setup to the next level. He covered all the ways ProxySQL can help with scalability, performance, and reliability. At Readyset, we’re proud to partner with ProxySQL — it’s a super mature project with a rich set of features that really complements what we’re building.
Later on, Ronald Bradford gave a talk about the deprecation and upcoming removal of mysql_native_password. He walked us through why this change is necessary and how caching_sha2_password addresses the security issues that existed with the old method. It was a great reminder of how important it is to stay on top of authentication changes — especially with security becoming more and more critical every day.
While chatting with some of the folks from Oracle, they all shared that they expect this event to keep growing bigger and better each year. It was really great to see so many people from the MySQL community speaking, attending, and just being part of the energy.
Overall, I had a fantastic time during those two days — I was able to connect (and reconnect) with a lot of old friends from the community. It’s definitely an event I’ll be putting on my calendar again for next year. Already looking forward to it!