MariaDB hugged Helsinki

One could say that MariaDB originates from Finland’s capital Helsinki. In fact so does MySQL. It was in the Helsinki area that MySQL saw daylight. It was here that Monty Widenius laid the ground for MySQL already in the 80’s, maybe even 1979, when he created UNIREG from which parts were reused when he together with the other 2 founders of MySQL released the first version of MySQL in 1995.

Last week, 19 years later, a MariaDB event was held in Helsinki. It was SkySQL that arranged the first in a row of this year’s MariaDB Roadshow events. The agenda included a walkthrough of MariaDB 10.0, some roadmap and MariaDB high availability options, which consisted of MariaDB Galera Cluster and MaxScale, the pluggable load balancer for MariaDB and MySQL. In addition Vinay from Severalnines visited to give a talk about automation and management of MariaDB Galera Cluster.

I gave the talk on MariaDB 10.0 and it was very interesting to learn that half of the audience was already using MariaDB. Also the amount of input at the end of my presentation on features the audience would like to see in MariaDB was impressive. Some of them were pretty specific, like usage of the same temporary table multiple times in the same query. Others more generic, like using the Connect storage engine, https://mariadb.com/kb/en/introduction-to-the-connect-engine/ as a central integration point for all interoperability with other databases, especially Redis and MongoDB.

Another very clear outcome from the event is that there is definitely a need for a good database load balancer and people enjoyed talking about MaxScale and how it could help them in their specific solutions.

In case you didn’t have a chance to join the MariaDB event in Helsinki, SkySQL has lined up a few of these events throughout the summer: