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Welcome to the second day of the MariaDB’s first user conference
On the 12th, at 09:00, started the first-ever experimental MariaDB Associate certification exam and I was glad to be among the first and participate
This exam was offered free of charges to all registered attendees
As I wrote over, it was really experimental because all candidates faced many problems
Certification
First, as this exam was proctored, the authentification process was very, very slow, essentially due to the overloaded network
Once done, we were all expecting a “Multiple Choice Question” as in almost all other certifications instead of we had to perform real-world database administration tasks on a remote linux box where a MariaDB server was installed
Following skills were tested:
Server configuration
Security
Users and Roles
Schema Operations
Query Performance
Backup and Restore
Testing duration was 90mn but when you are facing network break and slowness, it’s really short
To pass the exam you need 48 points on a total of 60, so 80%
One thing you do not have to forget when you are finished is to absolutely restart the MariaDB server otherwise all your servers configuration answers are lost
They kindly warned us before we started but at the end there were no alert and communication was roughly stopped
This certification will be definitely Online in one or two months
After lunch, which was as the day before a big buffet but more exotic, my decision was to go to the session of Ashraf Sharif from Severalnines
Step-By-Step: Clustering with Galera and Docker Swarm
I was really happy to see him as we often collaborated for several ClusterControl support cases. He was happy too
Unfortunately for him, he had to speed up because 45mn was not enough for such a vast topic
It was even quite a challenge as he had more than 140 slides and a demo
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Several key notes were then proposed to close this 2-days event in the conference center
Again the air-conditioning was too cool and this time I got sick
Gunnar Hellekson, director of Product Management for Red Hat Enterprise Linux started with Open Source in a dangerous world
He discussed mainly on how we can leverage the amazing innovation coming out of open source communities while still plotting a journey with secure, stable and supported open source platforms, illustrating with some examples of customer and organizations that use open source to not just innovate but add more competitive advantage
The last key note was proposed by Michael Widenius himself, Everything Old is New: the return of relational
As the database lanscape is changing, evolving very fast and is no longer the property of some as Oracle, IBM or Microsoft,
he is convinced that even NOSQL may work for a subset of use cases, open source relational database are delivering more and more capabilities for NoSQL use cases at a rapid pace

As a conclusion for this MariaDB’s first user conference, my overall impression is positive, it was well organized, all the staff were enthusiastic and open, we could meet and talk with a lot of different people
So, a sweet juicy well dosed workshop, some high level sessions to bring sweetness and acidity into perfect harmony, 3 or 4 spicy key notes to enhance the taste of the event spirit, all ingredients to a cocktail shaker, shake and you obtain the delicious and unforgettable M|17 cocktail.