Red Hat European Roadshow Hits London – Huge Interest in MariaDB and RHEL7

It’s always a pleasure to attend promotional events on your doorstep. Yesterday the RedHat European Roadshow rolled into my hometown to take over the Mermaid Conference Centre in Blackfriars, EC4. Not a venue I’d been to before, I must admit, but easy enough to reach after a refreshing morning walk down the South Bank from Waterloo station.

The roadshow programme started at 9.30am sharp with keynote talks from Jim Totton, VP Platform Business Unit and Clive Freeman, Chief Technologist, Enterprise Group focusing on RedHat’s recent RHEL7 release. If you don’t already know, MariaDB now ships as the default relational database management system in RHEL7, replacing Oracle MySQL.

The MariaDB booth at the subsequent coffee break was abuzz with questions about how delegates could migrate to MariaDB.

MariaDB ‘booth babes’ Pasi Vuorela (Sweden), Olivier Beutels (Belgium), Maria-Luisa Raviol (Italy) and Dion Cornett (USA) did a fine job of hosting industry colleagues, channel partners and prospective clients from UK government agencies, universities and the financial services industry. Most of our visitors we’re particularly interested in using MariaDB and Galera in highly available, clustered environments.

Where we differed from most other sponsors at the event was the enormous amount of goodwill shown by delegates towards the MariaDB project. Most agreed that the time was right for a shake-up in the RDMS space.

With RedHat now firmly behind MariaDB we anticipate strong enterprise adoption and an even more vibrant community.