In the week of 14-20 September 2020, MariaDB Foundation will host the MariaDB Server Fest Online Conference. We welcome the Percona Community not just to participate, but also to submit papers for the event. We already have Peter Zaitsev joining as keynoter; we hope for more to come.

Our target audience are the users of MariaDB Server – current and future ones. We are looking for use cases, practices, tools and insights from our user base as well as from application developers, service providers and other experts.

When planning and phrasing your CfP submission at https://mariadb.org/fest2020cfp/, think about what makes MariaDB Server unique, and what insights you can give the demanding audience.

• Our audience is interested in your insights about new cool features of the latest releases, but also in underused MariaDB functionality that has been there for a while.
• Functionality such as system versioned tables, JSON functionality, and security features is interesting, and the same goes for usage patterns and best practices.
• Share your knowledge of PL/SQL, SEQUENCEs and other Oracle compatibility features, but also in experiences from overall migration strategies.
• Our audience is interested in comparing HA, Galera and general replication functionality to that of other similar databases, but would likely want to avoid overly confrontational flame wars on, say, Global Transaction ID.
• Developers and DBAs are used to seeing MariaDB positioned in contrast to MySQL (level of compatibility; differences in feature set), but may also find it insightful with comparisons to PostgreSQL, MongoDB and Oracle.
• Developers, sysadmins and devops are focused on technology and functionality, but is also very mindful of the implications of release schedules, security fix processes, and engaging the community in submitting code contributions.

For more about our conference, see our announcement at https://mariadb.org/fest/ and https://mariadb.org/fest2020cfp/.

Finally: thank you to Tom Basil of Percona, who opened up the opportunity for us to write this guest blog on the Percona Community Blog!

We hope for many interesting submissions – and, later on, attendees – from the Percona Community. Footnote: The Call for Papers is open for one more week, until the end of June. ∎