MariaDB 5.5 and what comes next

In two years the MariaDB project has had four major releases with a tonne of major features. Why should you care about it? This is not a talk about the community around MariaDB, but a feature-by-feature blowout as to why you should consider this database which is current to MySQL 5.5.

* How does MariaDB execute queries faster? Materialize subqueries that are non-corelated? Find out about our immense changes in the optimizer, as we have an overview of the many changes available in MariaDB 5.3 and 5.5.
* We include many storage engines, but why should you care about XtraDB, Aria, FederatedX and the SphinxSE storage engine?
* Are you interested in doing full-text search (FTS) with groonga? How does it compare to SphinxSE?
* Oracle's MySQL has a commercial thread pool and authentication plugins. Why are we opensourcing such features inside of MariaDB?
* Still using MyISAM? Have you heard of the segmented MyISAM keycaches?
* How does progress reporting help you, the DBA?
* Running many parallel queries? Learn how group commit will speed up your database.

Expect such a session to be packed with useful features that MariaDB has, and you will soon learn why you might consider migrating to the drop-in replacement to MySQL. Yes, did we mention, its fully backward compatible?

Wonder what happens next after MariaDB 5.5? The work coming for improvements in replication are coming in MariaDB next. Watch this space for what will be focused on.