Join Percona Chief Evangelist Colin Charles as he covers happenings, gives pointers and provides musings on the open source database community.

This week we saw the closing of the CFPs for MariaDB’s user conference, M18. Peter Zaitsev and I submitted for Percona (don’t forget that there is also a developer’s conference tacked on to this event). We don’t have high expectations of getting a talk there, but hey – you never know! I submitted a talk on running MariaDB in the cloud (either hosted on Amazon RDS or Rackspace) or in your own compute instance. Another talk on capacity planning seemed to make sense as well. …

Let me introduce myself, I’m Colin Charles.

Percona turns ten years old this year. To me, there is no better time to join the company as the Chief Evangelist in the CTO office.

I’ve been in the MySQL world a tad longer than Percona has, and have had the pleasure of working on MySQL at MySQL AB and Sun Microsystems. Most recently I was one of the founding team members for MariaDB Server in 2009. I watched that grow into the MariaDB Corporation (after the merger with SkySQL) and the MariaDB Foundation.

For me, it’s about the right server for the right job. Today they all support a myriad of different features and different storage engines. Each server has its own community that supports and discusses their pros and cons. This is now true for both the MySQL and MongoDB ecosystems.

I’ve always had a lot …

I caught up with Zach Skyles Owens, a PHP Evangelist at Microsoft. If you missed the embed, watch the video. I have some sparse notes below.

I learned some new things:

• Microsoft spends time working with the PHP community
• They are porting applications to work with an SQL Server backend
• They are ensuring that the language should “just work”, with the IIS and SQL Server stack. This is quite different from the usual AMP (Apache = server, MySQL = database, PHP = language) stack that we’re quite accustomed to.
• There is a Microsoft Web Platform, and there’s a Web Application Gallery, that brings in …