It was a great experience to attend the MySQL Connect Conference for the first time ever. Personally I was very much enthralled to present about "How to make MySQL Backups" besides attending different sessions to absorb more knowledge about the technical prospects of MySQL. One of the agenda items in my presentation was "MySQL Enterprise Backup" functionality and features. There were total of 40 attendees in the session, who were very much interested about the MySQL Enterprise Backup product and gave positive feedback as well as areas of improvements on our product. Some of our features brought lot of excitement and smile amongst our customers including,

1. Performance improvements in MEB 3.8.0
2. Incremental Base option from MEB 3.7.1 where there is no need to specify the directory name of the previous backup to fetch the lsn values and instead can directly fetch from backup_history table using --incremental-base=history: last_backup
3. only-innodb-with-frm option introduced in MEB 3.7 version. A true online hot backup of InnoDB tables.

I also attended a session with similar topic "MEB Best Practices" conducted by Sanjay Manwani, where he double clicked all the features and best strategies of backup & restore. I also got an opportunity to attend other sessions including,

* Enabling the new generation of web and cloud services with MySQL 5.6 replication
* Getting the most out of MySQL with MySQL Workbench
* InnoDB compression for OLTP
* Scaling for the Web and Cloud with MySQL replication.

Above all, had some special moments in the conference including meeting some of the executives / colleagues for the first time f2f. On a whole, the first MySQL Connect conference was a great success in terms of manifesting the features of our products, direct feedback from customer and team building.  We also had some applauding yahoo moments when Tomas Ulin announced different releases including MySQL 5.6 RC, Connector Python 1.0 and ODBC 5.2 release, MySQL Cluster 7.3, additions to MySQL Enterprise edition etc.