LinuxFest Northwest was HUGE this year!

This weekend Team MariaDB attended the 15th annual LinuxFest Northwest. This event has been growing every year, but this year it crossed over to become a HUGE event. There were over 1800 attendees this year, and we had the chance to talk to many of them at our booth and in our talks. Monty talked about what was new in MariaDB 10.1 and Max spoke about Sharding MariaDB and MySQL with Spider. Both of these talks were well attended and had many great questions raised.

The big party, sponsored by Microsoft, was moved from the Bellingham Spark Museum, where in years past Monty got in a Faraday Cage beside a Tesla Coil that outputs 4,000,000 volts,to the Whatcom Museum.With 1800 attendees they had run out of tickets before we were able to make our way to the Microsoft booth to collect ours. I heard it was a great party, but I also appreciated the good night sleep that not going afforded me.

The exhibit hall was as action packed as the years gone by and this gave us a great chance to talk to people about MariaDB. A tend that I have been noticing at events is that we are now hearing from more and more people who are currently using MariaDB. Even as recent as last year I would have many conversations with those who were considering moving to MariaDB, but had not yet made the decision to do so. I think that this has to have been changing due in part to the fact that MariaDB is now packaged as default in most Linux distributions.

Another record from this year’s event would be the amount of MariaDB Poppers® that we handed out. We shipped several hundred to the event and went home with none. It was pretty wild to look around the halls and show floor and see dozens of people walking around bouncing our MariaDB Poppers®. Kolbe shot some sweet slow motion video of a popper in action

If you are looking for an excellent event to attend next year I highly recommend LinuxFest Northwest 2016. They have it planned for the last weekend in April so mark you calendars now.

To see a full list of which events we will be attending this year have a look at our Events Section. If there is an event that you think that Team MariaDB should attend that is not listed please let us know. We hope to see you at an event soon.