Linux.conf.au this year kicks off next week in Ballarat, just down the road from me.  I'll be there and even have a speaking gig, not in the main conference but in the HA and Distributed Storage mini-conf before the main event.

I'll be talking about MySQL®, the companies that now exist to support it, and the third party products that are starting to proliferate in what appears to be a community effort to address perceived shortcomings in the Oracle offerings.  Many of these offerings are in the HA space, and there have been some pretty amazing developments recently.

So if you want to find some history of Oracle's effect on MySQL's development (and a hint, it started well before the Sun acquisition), or you want to find out what is out there to assist you in developing HA and Distributed database systems, come along.  I'll be wearing my SkySQL shirt so I should be easy to pick.