Trip Report: DrupalCon Portland 2013
I have never been to a DrupalCon before so my first was DrupalCon Portland 2013 (with some 3,500+ attendees). My first DrupalCon happened to also be one that I spoke at, and I hope to return to Austin in 2014 (added bonus: I’ve never been to Texas before).
SkySQL had decided to get a booth at DrupalCon since I was speaking and I have to say that the booth was very successful. You may ask why and the simple reasons are:
- Everyone at DrupalCon was a user of MySQL. Once they hit scale, they may need professional services or even just switch to MariaDB. This is a captive audience.
- Everyone running Drupal at scale with many modules and nodes generally faced issues with database slowdowns. Hello remote DBA, consulting, or 24/7 support.
- We never had a bit of spare time to relax at the booth because people came over in droves to find out how MariaDB could help them, how SkySQL might make sense for them, or just poke us with general Q&A about MySQL. This happened even thru lunch, which we consumed at the booth. Let me add that lunch was great: Mexican, BBQ, etc.
- My talk was at an odd slot: competing with beer at 5pm. The room was full. There were many interesting questions. People were clearly interested in improving their database for Drupal. Lots of positive/immediate feedback on Twitter.
- Affable characters manned the booth. SkySQL sent Rod Allen and Marc Sherwood, and I enjoyed managing the booth with them. Conversation was great. The day I had to give a talk, I spoke all day at the booth then gave my talk!
It was also great to catch up with Dave Stokes, MySQL Community Manager, as he had a booth too. I hope we sent him some traffic! He’s also the writer of the Keeping your Drupal from Drooping series, so read part 1 & part 2. I reckon that I’ll blog more about Drupal & MariaDB soon as well.
I met some old friends., some of whom are working for the Whitehouse now. I also met some new friends who are all very gung ho about MariaDB at scale for Drupal hosting.
Here’s to happy Drupal & MariaDB/MySQL users!
