MariaDB in Tokyo

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In July, I visited Tokyo, which is a hotbed for technology (especially around databases), to attend the yearly event db tech showcase 2016, held at the Akihabara UDX. My talk focused on Lessons from Database Failures, my third time speaking on the topic and it was well received by the audience.

Towards the end of my session, there was some discussion about what I didn’t get to talk about – MariaDB ColumnStore, which many InfiniDB users expressed interest in. I was able to talk about it briefly in the hallway and encouraged people to attend the Tokyo MariaDB User Group Meetup.

A few days later, we had the Tokyo MariaDB User Group Meetup, organised by Spiral Arms and hosted at All About Corp.

My talk at the Meetup focused on MariaDB 10.1: What’s New and What’s Coming in 10.2 and I was happy to see that many of the attendees were already using MariaDB Server 10.0 and 10.1. Encryption was a key topic for many who attended my session. There was also a separate talk on groonga/mroonga, where we realised that the versions shipping inside of MariaDB Server are quite dated. There really should be a goal to ensure that developers can commit directly (but first, also ensure that mroonga builds on all platforms that we support, e.g. OpenBSD and FreeBSD). Of course, it was also wonderful to hear about the SPIDER roadmap and what’s planned, considering there are more users of this engine these days.

The last talk was focused on MariaDB ColumnStore, which Kentoku (SPIDER’s developer) gave in Japanese. This presentation had lots of Q&A. I think the most important clarification from the Q&A is that the ColumnStore source is available on github. There were also questions around why some code is stored on github.com/mariadb-corporation, while other code on github.com/mariadb. The clearest explanation is on ownership — so, we did talk about the trademark document. After that it was a free-for-all for sushi, beer and snacks so people could cheers, and continue talking.

All in, both talks in Tokyo were successful, and it’s abundantly clear that there are lots of people there who are very into databases.