Team MariaDB at LinuxFest Northwest: Another amazing event in the Pacific Northwest

Another Shockingly good time at LinuxFest NorthWest!

Last weekend several members of Team MariaDB made their way to Bellingham Washington for the 15th LinuxFest North West. This event has grown from a small one room gathering to one of the premier Linux/Open Source events in the country. This year there where over 1500 registered guests for the event, and I must say it felt like there may have been even more. A big congratulations must go out to Bill Wright and the others on the team that work so hard to make this such a great event

Being an event in the Pacific Northwest it makes it a quick drive for Gerry, one of our Senior Sales Engineers, to come up from Seattle, and a short drive down form Vancouver for me. This year we were joined by Monty who was able to come by while he was on route back to Finland. Between Gerry and Monty we had everything covered from a technical standpoint.

Monty had two talks this year and both were packed to the rafters. In fact in both talks there were people sitting on the floor in the hall to hear him speak. On Saturday he talked about MariaDB 10 and after his talk we had a crowd at our booth who were ready to make the change from MySQL to MariaDB. On Sunday his talk was about how to making money developing with open source which seemed to be very well received.

Gerry talked on Sunday about Making HA Deployments Easy with MariaDB Manager. All those who were interested in either HA or MariaDB were on hand to learn about this new tool.

Each year at LinuxFest Northwest they host the “World Famous Raffle”. As there were some outstanding prizes I decided to go against my known poor luck and get some tickets. Well it seems that EVERYONE had the same idea. During the drawing on Saturday there must have been close to 1000 people in the room. Needless to say I did not win anything, but those around me were winning Chrome Books, HP Slates and all sorts of great things.

MariaDB was a BIG draw at this event. We must have talked to half of those who attended the event, and everyone was keen to learn about MariaDB and how it stacked up against MySQL. This table does a pretty good job of covering that question. There was no question that the adoption rate of MariaDB is climbing. The number of people we meet who ask “what is MariaDB?” gets smaller at every event.

The team that puts on this event not only makes sure that the core event is packed with great talks, and runs smoothly, but also makes sure there is plenty of after hours fun. On the Friday night they had games night that saw over 120 people enjoying some find local beers and playing some interesting board games. On the Saturday night Microsoft (yes Microsoft) hosted a party at the Spark Museum of Electrical Invention. This is as must see museum if you are in the area, but it is only made better when they put Monty in a Faraday Cage beside a Tesla Coil that outputs 4,000,000 volts. He went in without worry – must trust that science stuff!

This is an event that I would suggest that you consider attending next year. I know that we will be there.