Category Archives: Conferences/Events
The first dedicated MariaDB devroom at FOSDEM is being held on Saturday 6 February. In previous years, the joint MySQL, MariaDB and Friends devroom has been overwhelmed with submissions. With the event going virtual, there was space for separate MySQL and MariaDB rooms this year, giving us twice as much time to showcase talks of interest to the community. We were very pleased to receive 33 submissions, although this was still far more than we had space to accommodate.
The committee, consisting of Aurélien Lequoy (68koncept), Colin Charles, Daniel Bartholomew (MariaDB Corporation), Manuel Arostegui (Wikimedia Foundation), Sveta Smirnova (Percona) and Vicențiu Ciorbaru (MariaDB Foundation) was given the task of whittling down the number, and decided on the following talks.
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On the last day of the year, let me share a few thoughts in hindsight on a year that didn’t turn out as anyone expected. The outcome: Not everyone was as lucky as MariaDB Foundation. The pandemic takes longer than expected, and mixes the deck of winners and losers. Sure, most of us lose, a lot. But the forced break can provide lessons for a better post-pandemic life (and business).
Picture: Sanna Marin, PM of Finland, CC BY 4.0 Laura Kotila/Statsrådets kansli 2019 via Wikimedia Commons
Two early pandemic blog entries in March
Background: In March this year (which sometimes feels like yesterday, sometimes like ages ago), I wrote two blog entries about the strange situation caused by the Corona pandemic.
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We are pleased to announce the FOSDEM21 MariaDB devroom committee.
In February 2021, MariaDB will for the first time be hosting a dedicated devroom at FOSDEM, and the committee are tasked with narrowing down the submitted presentations to choose the most interesting final selection for the FOSDEM and MariaDB communities.
In past years, as part of the joint MySQL, MariaDB and Friends devroom, the number of submissions far exceeded the available slots, and we look forward to burdening the committee with a similar problem this year.
The committee
Aurélien Lequoy (68koncept)
Colin Charles
Daniel Bartholomew (MariaDB Corporation)
Manuel Arostegui (Wikimedia Foundation)
Sveta Smirnova (Percona)
Vicențiu Ciorbaru (MariaDB Foundation)
Welcome to everyone, and we can’t wait to see what you decide on!
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Done! Our first MariaDB Server MiniFest is over. A smaller version of our MariaDB Server Fest format, the first MiniFest was about the MariaDB Server Release Policy.
Where to find the recordings
Should you have missed the party, we have recorded the 3:18:45 hours of Best Bits for you, available directly on https://mariadb.org/minifest2020/. The sessions are also available individually, as linked below.
Presentations by MariaDB
We started off by three presentations by MariaDB:
- On Building MariaDB, by Daniel Bartholomew (MariaDB Corporation), with a follow-up interview by Vicentiu Ciorbaru and Vlad Bogolin (both MariaDB Foundation)
- On Merging MariaDB (exact title: Ensuring Build Quality in MariaDB) by Oleksandr “Sanja” Byelkin (MariaDB Corporation), with a follow-up interview by Vicentiu Ciorbaru
- On Security by Sergei Golubchik (MariaDB Corporation and Foundation), with a follow-up interview by Ian Gilfillan (MariaDB Foundation)
The User View
We continued with three presentations by users:
- From a Linux Distribution perspective, by Otto Kekäläinen of Debian, with a follow-up interview by Daniel Black (MariaDB Foundation)
- From a Microsoft perspective, by Sunil Kamath of MSFT, as interviewed by Kaj Arnö (MariaDB Foundation)
- From a Fintech perspective, by Kamalakannan Annathurai of DBS Bank (one of Asia’s biggest banks, in Singapore), as interviewed by Kaj Arnö (MariaDB Foundation)
The concluding Panel
For the concluding Panel on the MariaDB Release Policy, we had asked all speakers and interviewers to be present, which proved challenging – given timezones spanning from Canberra over Singapore across EMEA to the Americas.
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Earlier this week we were happy to announce that MariaDB will have its own devroom at FOSDEM21, taking place on 6 February 2021, and now the CfP is open.
FOSDEM is free to attend, and no registration is necessary. It’s aimed at free and open-source developers, so engineering and DBA-related topics such as:
- best practices
- migrating to MariaDB
- MariaDB features
- optimising on particular hardware
are all welcome. Submissions that miss the mark, such as marketing talks, are not welcome.
We are expecting far more submissions than we can accommodate, so we are looking for 20 minute talks (with an extra 5m for questions) to accommodate as many high-quality speakers as possible.
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Great news! MariaDB got its own DevRoom at FOSDEM 6-7 Feb 2021. Usually FOSDEM happens in Brussels, but nobody is surprised that it is virtual this year.
What FOSDEM is
FOSDEM is the biggest Free and Open Source Developers Meeting worldwide. I am sure it remains so in these pandemic times. While I will miss all the many social f2f encounters at FOSDEM, I am looking forward to meeting people virtually.
Separating MariaDB from MySQL
For MariaDB Foundation, this is no small challenge. We will have to establish a Program Committee of our own, when we have so far cohabitated with MySQL.
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New MariaDB releases come with regular intervals. Releasing a new version is a balance between new functionality and bugfixes on one side, and stability on the other. How do we get optimum quality for the releases? And what exactly is quality, from the point of view of DBAs and developers that use MariaDB Server?
That’s the setting of our MariaDB Server MiniFest in two weeks.
New MariaDB Releases: The DBA & Developer Experience
This MiniFest is called “mini” for three key reasons:
- It has just one topic
- It is much shorter, less than half a day
- It happens just in one time zone
But it still builds on the pillars of success from our MariaDB Server Fest in Sep 2020:
- It features expert speakers on MariaDB Server
- It has pre-recording, subtitles, and follow-up discussions
- It is interactive, with the speakers “cloned” on Zulip chat
The special sauce
The special sauce for this MiniFest is
- Internal presenters explain the logic of release policies
- External presenters give the candid user perspective
- The desired outcome: improved processes and quality
The conference format
The internal (provider) presentations have a 10+10 minute format.
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Machine learning is one area that cannot succeed without data. Traditionally, machine learning frameworks read it from CSV files or similar data sources. This brings an interesting set of challenges because in most cases the data is stored in databases, not simple raw files. It takes time and effort to move data from one format to another. Additionally, one needs to write some code (usually python) to prepare the data just like the ML framework expects it.
I was pleasantly surprised when I saw during the MariaDB Server Fest that MindsDB, an automatic machine learning system, presented their integration with MariaDB.
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