Archive for the ‘MariaDB’ Category

What’s next

I received an overwhelming number of comments when I said I was leaving MariaDB Corporation. Thank you – it is really nice to be appreciated.

I haven’t left the MySQL ecosystem. In fact, I’ve joined Percona as their Chief Evangelist in the CTO Office, and I’m going to focus on the MySQL/Percona Server/MariaDB Server ecosystem, while also looking at MongoDB and other solutions that are good for Percona customers. Thanks again for the overwhelming response on the various social media channels, and via emails, calls, etc.

Here’s to a great time at Percona to focus on open source databases and solutions around them!

My first blog post on the Percona blog – I’m Colin Charles, and I’m here to evangelize open source databases!, the press release.

Changing of the guard

I posted a message to the internal mailing lists at MariaDB Corporation. I have departed (I resigned) the company, but definitely not the community. Thank you all for the privilege of serving the large MariaDB Server community of users, all 12 million+ of you. See you on the mailing lists, IRC, and the developer meetings.

The Japanese have a saying, “leave when the cherry blossoms are full”.

I’ve been one of the earliest employees of this post-merge company, and was on the founding team of the MariaDB Server having been around since 2009. I didn’t make the first company meeting in Mallorca (August 2009) due to the chickenpox, but I’ve been to every one since.

We made the first stable MariaDB Server 5.1 release in February 2010. Our first Linux distribution release was in openSUSE. Our then tagline: MariaDB: Community Developed. Feature Enhanced. Backward Compatible.

In 2013, we had to make a decision: merge with our sister company SkySQL or take on investment of equal value to compete; majority of us chose to work with our family.

Our big deal was releasing MariaDB Server 5.5 – Wikipedia migrated, Google wanted in, and Red Hat pushed us into the enterprise space.

Besides managing distributions and other community related activities (and in the pre-SkySQL days Rasmus and I did everything from marketing to NRE contract management, down to even doing press releases – you wear many hats when you’re in a startup of less than 20 people), in this time, I’ve written over 220 blog posts, spoken at over 130 events (an average of 18 per year), and given generally over 250 talks, tutorials and keynotes. I’ve had numerous face-to-face meetings with customers, figuring out what NRE they may need and providing them solutions. I’ve done numerous internal presentations, audience varying from the professional services & support teams, as well as the management team. I’ve even technically reviewed many books, including one of the best introductions by our colleague, Learning MySQL & MariaDB.

Its been a good run. Seven years. Uncountable amount of flights. Too many weekends away working for the cause. A whole bunch of great meetings with many of you. Seen the company go from bootstrap, merger, Series A, and Series B.

It’s been a true privilege to work with many of you. I have the utmost respect for Team MariaDB (and of course my SkySQL brethren!). I’m going to miss many of you. The good thing is that MariaDB Server is an open source project, and I’m not going to leave the project or #maria. I in fact hope to continue speaking and working on MariaDB Server.

I hope to remain connected to many of you.

Thank you for this great privilege.

Kind Regards,
Colin Charles

Speaking in July 2016

  • Texas LinuxFest – July 8-9 2016 – Austin, Texas – I’ve never spoken at this event before but have heard great things about it. I’ve got a morning talk about what’s in MariaDB Server 10.1, and what’s coming in 10.2.
  • db tech showcase – July 13-15 2016 – Tokyo, Japan – I’ve regularly spoken at this event and its a case of a 100% pure database conference, with a very captive audience. I’ll be talking about the lessons one can learn from other people’s database failures (this is the kind of talk that keeps on changing and getting better as the software improves).
  • The MariaDB Tokyo Meetup – July 21 2016 – Tokyo, Japan – Not the traditional meetup timing, since its 1.30pm-7pm, there will be many talks and its organised by the folk behind the SPIDER storage engine. It should be fun to see many people and food is being provided too. In Japanese: MariaDB コミュニティイベント in Tokyo, MariaDB Community Event in TOKYO.

Speaking in June 2016

I have a few upcoming speaking engagements in June 2016:

  • Nerdear.la – June 9-10 2016 – Buenos Aires, Argentina – never been to this event but MariaDB Corporation are sponsors and I’m quite excited to be back in Buenos Aires. I’m going to talk about the MySQL ecosystem in 2016.
  • SouthEast LinuxFest – June 10-12 2016 – Charlotte, NC, USA – I have a few talks here, a bit bummed that I’m going to be missing the speaker dinner, but I expect this to be another great year. Learn about MariaDB Server/MySQL Security Essentials, the MySQL ecosystem in 2016, and about distributions from the view of a package.
  • NYC MySQL Meetup – June 27 2016 – New York, USA – I’m going to give a talk on lessons you can learn from other people’s database failures. I did this at rootconf.in, and it was well received so I’m quite excited to give this again.
  • Community Open House for MongoDB – June 30 2016 – New York, USA – I’m going to give my first MongoDB talk at the Community Open House for MongoDB – My First Moments with MongoDB, from the view of someone who’s been using MySQL for a very long time.

So if you’re in Buenos Aires, Charlotte or New York, I’m looking forward to seeing you to talk all things databases and open source.

London roadshow wrap-up, see you in Paris next week

Just a few days ago, I presented at the MariaDB Roadshow in London, and I had a lot of fun. While I had canned slides, I did know the topic intimately well, so it was good to get further in-depth. In addition, we had these MasterMind sessions, basically the place to get one-on-one time with Anders/Luisa/or me, I noticed that pretty much everyone said they were buying services afterwards (which more or less must mean the event was rather successful from that standpoint!).

In addition to that, I was happy to see that from attendee feedback, I did have the highest averages – thank you!

So here’s to repeating this in Paris next week — Gestion des données pour les applications vitales — MariaDB Roadshow Paris. I look forward to seeing you there, and I know we are repeating the MasterMind sessions. To fine-tune it, try to bring as much information as you possibly can so our time can be extremely effective.

London in May 2016

I’m happy to be back in London in May 2016, to talk at two events:

  1. The London MySQL Meetup GroupMonday May 9 – 6.30 PM – 9.00 PM – options for High Availability in the ecosystem that one would consider today. This is a cut down from my Percona Live tutorial, which had about 88 registered attendees and about that amount showed up and asked questions even through the break and after. I had a lot of fun, and I expect I will have similar fun in London talking about this area that has changed a lot in recent times.
  2. Data for the Enterprise — MariaDB Roadshow in LondonWednesday, May 11, 2016 from 9:30 AM to 2:00 PM – this should be a fun gathering, and you would think its just for MariaDB Corporation customers, but it isn’t – all are welcome and you should register!

Looking forward to seeing you at these events. And if you want to chat about MariaDB Server, MySQL or anything related in the opensource world, don’t hesitate to drop me a line via email or Twitter @bytebot.


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