MySQL Conference

I will be heading down, bright and early, to the MySQL Conference and Expo down in Santa Clara, CA tomorrow through Thursday. My employer is sending me down there, as we still rely on MySQL for all of our data warehousing, so I'm hoping to learn a bit more about enterprise-level scalability. I know replication fairly well, as well as tuning the database server for memory requirements and performance -- but I always seem to find out that I don't know as much as I think I do. If anything, I want to find out if InnoDB really sucks as much as I think it does, or if I'm missing something.

The one thing that bothers me is that no one from the perl community seems to care much about this conference. I know MySQL is a bit of a baby database, but there's little to no representation. Meanwhile, there are sessions for PHP and Ruby all over the friggin place. I wonder if I could step up to the plate? ;)

I've become more of a PostgreSQL fan as of late, and I have a feeling that $employer is going to be moving that direction as well, as three out of the five of us are gung ho for moving that direction. Clustering, scalability, and flexibility of deployment are all strengths of Postgres, and speed is simply not an issue anymore.

But, really, anything but Microsoft SQL Server at this point.