OSCON 2014: Wrap Up

Another OSCON has been wrapped up. While these year was slightly smaller than last year it was still an amazing event. The interesting part was that MySQL and MariaDB seemed to be bigger topics than in years gone by.

Now that I have been back in the office for a few days, I am getting caught up on my overloaded inbox, and have had some time to reflect on the event.

The first thing that comes to mind is that MariaDB adoption rate is growing rapidly, and we hear about more amazing deployments at each event we attend. This year we met with a number of people who have made the switch from MySQL to MariaDB for their corporate use, as well as a good number of hosting companies who have migrated to MariaDB. We are working on getting some of these stories ready to share so stay tuned for more on that!

We aim to have fun in the MariaDB booth – how else could we stay semi-sane during those long hours (hint – we are not sane to begin with)? This year we had Nolan from EventToons to do caricatures in our booth. Shortly we will have all of these drawings available on our Facebook page. In the meantime here’s one of the world’s youngest MariaDB fan (my daughter):

The caricatures kept us quite busy in the MariaDB booth and also gave us a good chance to talk with our guests as well as to to have them complete a short survey. Here are some of the results that I found interesting:

I don’t think that seeing performance and availability at being at the top of this list will be a shock to anyone though I did find that scale and cost came in tied. This indicates to me that the areas in which we are focused on with MariaDB are in line with that people are saying that they need.

It was also interesting to see that physical servers onsite still are in the majority. I was expecting to see the cloud adoption a little higher than what we found here. An interesting follow-up question to this would have been “do you plan to change were your servers are currently running?”. My guess is that most have plans to leverage the cloud to some capacity.

For all those that we met who are using MariaDB today there were about twice that amount that are using MySQL. The good news is that they now have something worth migrating to.

On the migration topic, one thing that we offered to people at OSCON was a chance to meet with a MariaDB engineer to talk about how you are using MySQL today so that they could outline exactly where moving to MariaDB would bring performance gains. We would like to extend this offer to those of you who are also reading this blog. To request a call with an engineer you can simply complete this form and one of our Engineers will connect with you.

I am very much looking forward to next year’s OSCON, but before there we will be at a number of events. To see where we will be next have a look at our events calendar.