Thanks to everyone who attended OpenSQLCamp this past weekend in Portland, OR! More than 100 people participated – developers, DBAs and hobbyists from all over the world. Database developers participated from PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, Drizzle, TokuDB, LucidDB, MongoDB, Cassandra, CouchDB and many more.

The great thing about these events is the opportunity to trade ideas, code and stories. One project I’m very excited about is coming from some Portland State University students and a capstone project to create a new, interactive database client that works with more than just one DBMS. Igal gave a review of non-relational datastores. We had lightning talks about: open source column store databases, a many-master replication system called Trainwreck, open source at Microsoft, how to translate between NoSQL and SQL and many more.

You can see the full list of talks and notes from sessions as people update the wiki.

Joking about NoSQL aside, I was very happy to see many non-relational database developers in attendance, sharing information and participating in interesting discussions about the data management ecosystem. One meme we were happy to spread is that every tool has a purpose and I was happy to see this tweet:

I hope next time we can get a few more core Postgres developers to a Camp. Mark Callaghan expressed interest in a comparison of backend storage mechanisms, and several people were interested in detailed comparisons of replication strategies across many DBMSes.

Thank you to everyone who participated! (sorry I spelled your name wrong in the email, Mark. And left off your name in the list of GoDaddy road-trippers, Dan.) If you were there, please give us feedback!

We’re already looking forward to the next OpenSQL Camp. Some people thought we should do it again in Portland – and we’d be happy to host again next year! Baron also mentioned running an event in Washington, D.C.