A few weeks ago, Ronny the old guy of Linux User Group (Mauritius) who also happens to be the president announced a possible visit of Joffrey Michaie. I hadn’t met Joffrey before but I did hear a lot about him during my early days as a sysadmin. He is now a principal consultant at SkySQL.

Once Joffrey’s visit was confirmed Ronny sent out the message to organize a meetup with the theme “Let’s rock with MariaDB and MySQL”. He proposed the date Friday 15^th August. As location I went ahead and booked the conference room at Flying Dodo, Bagatelle.

Though the presentation was scheduled at 18h00, I reached Bagatelle earlier that day. I met a friend at Fastclick and we were chatting till Veer showed up. We then went to Flying Dodo where Ronny, his wife Sabera, Kamal and Joffrey had arrived. I greeted everyone and plugged my laptop, grabbed a wifi session and I shouted on facebook that we’re ready for the event. Little by little the room filled up. We initially expected in/around twenty people to attend, however by the time the presentation was in full swing we crossed the bar.

Joffrey started the presentation by introducing himself, telling us about his career and places he’s been. It was all about the life of a consultant who is constantly on the move. That sounded a lot like a digital nomad.

He took us into the history of MySQL, SkySQL and how MariaDB came to existence. The slides took a serious note when he triggered the explanation on High Availability (HA). I must say Joffrey explains very well and his slides complement everything that he wants you to know/remember.

Joffrey highlighted various HA mechanisms including MySQL replication. This garnered much attention & questions from the audience. In fact, as and when queries sprouted Joffrey answered all while staying in-line with his slides.

One fun thing that many didn’t realise during the presentation, well folks, we went through 107 slides without ever getting bored.

Towards the end of the presentation, Joffrey highlighted the history of MariaDB, it’s versioning, new features introduced etc. This part also garnered much attention and a lot of awe. I happen to be a proud user of MariaDB too (^^,) … Yup! My blog runs on MariaDB since more than a year now.

Presentation finished shortly after 20h00. All attendees received a MariaDB T-Shirt (courtesy of SkySQL) and through a lucky draw a couple few won pendrives. The whole presentation was recorded by Ajay. Hopefully, an edited video should be on LUGM’s Youtube Channel in the coming days.

To end the night well I had reserved a table at Flying Dodo itself for a round of beer. Most of us moved for the beer & we continued the usual chit-chat there. Some had beer, some had dame blanche while some took cold drinks. I discussed ideas for Linuxfest 2014, JCI Raspberry Pi Project etc, with Ajay and Jochen.

Afterwards some bid goodbye while a couple few stayed at Charleys for a quick dinner.