Earlier this month, I was at the OpenSourceDays 2010 conference, giving a talk on MariaDB (the slides from the talk are available).
The talk went quite well I think (though I probably talked way too fast as I usually do; at least that means that I finished on time with plenty room for questions..)
There was quite a bit of interest after the talk from many of the people who heard it. It was even reported on by the Danish IT media version2.dk (article in Danish).
Especially interesting to me was to discuss with three people from Danish site komogvind.dk, who told me fascinating details about their work keeping a busy site running; one of them even went right home to benchmark against MariaDB. Thanks to you, and to everyone else for your interest and time!
This time in the talk, I tried to also focus on the community and development aspects of MariaDB (in addition to the mandatory feature list and benchmark graphs, of course). To me, the most important thing about MariaDB is that we now have the infrastructure and community for people outside of MySQL to do fullscale development at the same level as inside MySQL. This was missing before. It is a much less concrete thing than features and benchmarks, so I found it much harder to present in a good way, without it turning into nothing but buzzwords. But from the feedback I got afterwards, it seems I succeeded pretty well with this part also, which I am especially happy about!
The talk was recorded on video by the organisers. The latest I heard was that the video footage is still being edited though (I was kind of waiting, hoping to be able to include a link to the video in this post). But if they do manage to finish the editing and make the videos available later, I will post an update.
A big thanks to the organisers of the OpenSourceDays 2010 conference! I had a great time, and hope to be back again next spring for OpenSourceDays 2011.