Infobright Blog

Open-Source and community conferences are always the most fun.  Nine times out of ten, I end up coding late at night alongside a cold beer and a few other coders with their beverages of choice.  In fact, each night at ZendCon I spent looking at developer challenges, Infobright log parsing, and even a mini-POC.  Beyond late night festivities, ZendCon provided many daytime fun as well. 

Firstly, Zend announced their new Zend Studio Beta and their PaaS PHP service "phpcloud.com."  At first, I was lukewarm on phpcloud, but after Kevin Schroeder's talk, it became apparent that their solution has some good potential.  At this point, it's impossible to install and use a database (such as Infobright) other than MySQL.  As time goes on, I'll be voicing my encouragement within phpcloud to allow for analytic databases such as Infobright.

Secondly, the NoSQL representation was moderate, but for a conference like ZendCon, it was pretty adequate.  In my mind, three NoSQL variants were in play: MongoDB, REDIS, and Couchbase/CouchDB/Memcached.  Mongo, a big sponsor of the event, held great discussions on the product.  In fact, their CEO presented as the keynote on the last day.  After these past few conferences, it's pretty aparante that Mongo is here to stay.  Next, Josh Butts (twitter: jimbojsb) gave a great talk/introduction to REDIS.  As a key-value store, it seems quite easy to get started and pretty user friendly.  Finally, Couchbase held a booth.  What's Couchbase?  Well, as we defined it during lunch, Couchbase is the love child of CouchDB and Memcached.  It will soon provide the power of a key-value store with an embedded doc store.  When Couchbase 2.0 comes out, I'll be curious to see it in action.

Finally, other technologies emerged from my talks with other community members.  JetBrains clearly has a great following, and it looks like they’re attracting great momentum as a PHP IDE (PhpStorm).  PagodaBox, a PaaS PHP company, just came out of the shadows at ZendCon.  PagodaBox seems like a very easy-to-use and scalable platform for PHP.  Plus, I am eagerly pushing them to introduce ICE (at a minimum) as a quick and easy database choice.  Be on the lookout over the coming months – we’ll see if they give into peer pressure.

All in all, the conference was a lot of fun, and some great technologies were highlighted.  I also want to give a shout-out to Michael Kismal (http://webdevradio.com/).  It was a pleasure speaking with him regarding Infobright and analytic databases in general.  Once the podcast becomes available, I’ll be sure to let everyone know.  Also, congrats to Michelangelo from PHP Benelux on wrapping up his call for papers.  I’m hoping to push Infobright to give me a seat at the conference, but we’ll play it by ear .

Until next year!

-Jeff