Interesting enough this year people at OSCON do not show to much interest in the MySQL, and Databases for that reason. Our talk comparing performance of MySQL Storage Engines had probably 20-30 people, Monty’s talk on MySQL Source Code had about same number, and as Monty told me he never had so few people on his talk. This is from massive 2600 people attending the conference.
The other Database related talks I visited had similar size of audience – talks on migration To and From MySQL, Josh Berkus talk on Performance Optimization (this one if about full stack), Developing using SQL Lite. On other hand front end related talks such as PHP performance optimization or High Performance JavaScript were attended extremely well.
MySQL BOF supported by bear and pizza had about same number of attendees. With a lot of familiar faces.
MySQL booth was not to active ether – in many cases I could see lonely Kelly sitting on it. But This could be related to the fact there were few MySQL Developers hanging around it most of the time, compared to army of technical guys at PostgreSQL booth. I would say even SolidDB booth was more attended.
I’ve heard comments from some MySQL people this is probably due to the fact all folks really interested in MySQL go to Users Conference. This is surely true but I would expect significant Overlap between “Open Source Guys” and “MySQL Users” and if you’re happen to be on the conference with topic of your interest you’re likely to visit sessions etc. Or may be people think they know they need to know about MySQL already and nothing cool happened from MySQL Users Conference ?
In general my impression PostgreeSQL is attracting more interest on the OSCON than MySQL.
