I always seem to get so busy (in a good way) during the conference to properly blog about it until it’s over. Today was the final day of the conference and the past few days have been fantastic! I did notice the smaller size this year (hard to miss given the number of booths at the Expo hall) which did put a dent into the quality and quantity of some of the talks. However, I have learned quite a bit more at this year’s conference that I had learned in the last few ones I have gone to.

Anything from new ways to use Sphinx and Gearman to some potential gotchas with the way I have been using Memcached (plus some new features I was not aware of). I was also happy to see PBXT still continuing to be developed and refined – the L2 cache concept using SSDs was particularly interesting. I know that idea is being used in things like RAID controllers and NetApp’s, it was nice to see it in a more native form (and without having to drop a ton of money to get such a technology) and I am excited to see how this matures.

The expo hall, though smaller this year that in years past, had some pretty cool companies. I like Virident’s replaceable flash module design in their series of cards quite a bit. Violin Systems was not there this year which is sort of odd considering much buzz there is around SSDs for databases. The were also some vendors offering some MySQL scaling solutions, such as Clustrix and Continuent which was neat to see. Continuent’s Tungsten solution looks promising for needs at my day job so it was nice to talk more about how it works and how it fits in.

MongoDB and PostgreSQL both had booths which I found interesting but which were also reasonably received. PostgreSQL in particular has some very compelling features I have wanted in MySQL (such as a copious amount of column types including real IP types). I’ll admit, though, they did have a slight “we are better than MySQL” sort of mentality.

Speaking of, I like some of the features of MariaDB and think it could have a place in MySQL landscape, but only if Monty stops throwing jabs at Oracle. His keynote had some entertaining moments but I did not really appreciate the Oracle jobs – what I wanted to know more about was the new features not found in MySQL, such as the functional columns as that seems like a neat feature. Drizzle, of course, tends to captivate my attention because I like many of the ideas. I do with PBXT was still in the Drizzle tree, mostly because I have a fondness for the engine and like having choices. Drizzle itself is becoming quite solid and is something I will be evaluating closely. It’s support of Memcached and Gearman is pretty cool indeed!

Future looks bright – I’m not sure what the future will be, whether it will be dominated by MySQL, Maria, Percona, Drizzle, PosgreSQL, Mongo, something else, all of the above, but some interesting times are still ahead for databases! So all in all, despite the smaller size, it was still a very good and very rewarding conference and I’m already looking forward to what sort of cool new things we will be talking about at next year’s conference!

(P.S., Falcon I still miss you)