I was very interested in seeing you talk, although I would have preferred something about tuning and performance analysis to a survey of not-quite-ready storage engines. Unfortunately, you were opposite Tim Bunce talking about his new tools for DBI (the Perl database interface), and that probably drew a lot of people who would otherwise want to go to a MySQL talk.

Scheduling talks is tough, and I’m sure they did the best they could to minimize conflicts. Don’t take it as a lack of interest in MySQL or your work.

Obviously from the glance view you can only tell these guys some kind of affiliated with PostgreSQL as they were wearing special PostgreSQL T-Shirts which were not given away, and also they did not look like Sales Guys

I agree this is good idea, considering PostgreSQL project nature.

I think it should be pointed out that the majority of technical people at the booth were not Postgres developers (although there were some) but, rather, users and DBAs in love with their database of choice. By both allowing and asking the Postgres users, of any type, present at the conference to represent the community, the openness of the Postgres project was only emphasized for us as well as giving those of us who haven’t submitted patches or previously been involved in the advocacy side of things a new avenue of participation past being involved with the mailing lists. Basically, it was a win-win for both the community at large and the individuals present.

Thanks for comment. May be I’ve miscounted - I did not count people just had general feeling of relatively low attendance.

Indeed your approach is great for OSCON - you may want Sales Army on your booth on the conferences like LinuxWord but this one is more geeky and hands on engineers are very important. There generally were few MySQL Developers this year - we had Brian and Monty of course but these did not spend most of their time at booth.

I actually spoke to Monty about this one and he agrees there should be more developers. Other than benefit for MySQL in terms of community building it is great reward for many engineers to go to OSCON.

First, I think your headcounts are a bit pessimistic because of the size of the rooms. My talk had about 60 attendees (I’ve been headcounting at OSCON for a few years) and Monty’s was very similar sized. Historically, though, DB talks at OSCON have always had lower attendence than programming language talks … that’s why there’s fewer of them.

Thanks for the compliment on the booth. I’ve already harassed Jay about this … there are never any engineers in the MySql booth, which leads people who don’t go your talks to think that there aren’t engineers at the conference. We use our booth as a promotional tool by staffing it with community members and it works very well, but that requires people at the booth who can answer technical questions.

Indeed this is the case. We submitted several MySQL Presentations which were targeting general audience and surely appealed to wider amount of users but for some reason only “Landscape of Open Source Transactional Storage Engines” talk was accepted which surely was targeted on experienced MySQL users.

This is actually funny as customers would still have access to them and will have a right to redistribute it as it is still GPL software.

Previous years seemed to have more interesting talks. And it’s seemed that the quantity of talks has declined since mysql has had it’s own conference.