Thanks to the following committee members:

MySQL Community:

• Ronald Bradford
• Sheeri K. Cabral
• Patrick Galbraith
• Giuseppe Maxia
• Sarah Novotny

Oracle Employees:

• Edwin DeSouza
• Todd Farmer
• Mat Keep
• Monica Kumar
• Bertrand Matthelié
• Andrew Morgan
• David Stokes
• Lars Thalmann
• Rob Young

The Business Challenge

WRS was looking for a robust database for enterprise-class web-based applications with the following features:

1. Security

Medical records and health information are highly confidential, and WRS expected to be fully incompliance with privacy regulations such as the HIPAA Privacy Rule.

2. Data Integrity

It is important to minimize data corruption and inconsistency for medical records, because they directly impact critical medical judgment and decisions.

3. Speed/Performance

Doctors work in a fast-paced environment and are not known for being patient. WRS was looking for a database with high performance, and was aiming to deliver the speed of an on-premise system with the SaaS model.

4. Low Cost and Scalability

WRS serves customers ranging from small practices to large enterprises. Therefore, WRS needed a database solution that was affordable to the smallest healthcare provider, while being able to scale to meet the demands of the largest providers who have hundreds of facilities.

The MySQL Solution

WRS evaluated both MySQL and PostgreSQL for its EMR and Practice Management System, and decided to use MySQL for the following reasons:

1. Ubiquity

MySQL is the world’s most popular open-source database with millions of installations. It is widely used and is a proven technology.

2. Better Support

In addition to the community users who actively share knowledge and best practices, it was also important for WRS to know that there is an enterprise behind the product that they can turn to for help if needed. MySQL was created by MySQL AB, and subsequently was developed and improved by Sun Microsystems and now Oracle through acquisitions.It provides WRS with Scalability.

3. Open Source / Open Standard

MySQL is the “M” in the open-source LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP/Python/Perl) stack. By leveraging and integrating the existing open-source technology, WRS was able to develop products and features more quickly, and with better interoperability.

WRS uses MySQL replication to achieve scalability, deploying the master-slave topology. “With MySQL, we can scale as we need. I can install it on many machines and handle any required volume,” said Brad Hall, Systems Administrator at WRS. “This gives us far more flexibility with hardware.” Three primary slaves all have to handle the volume of over 6,000 queries per second throughout the day, and WRS uses partitioning to increase speed.

With MySQL, WRS was able to develop a modular EMR and Practice Management solution to support thousands of medical practices, with the following features: electronic medical and health records; billing; scheduling; electronic prescriptions; online patient registration; practice website; messaging; order tracking; transcription; document management; and disease management. “We required an open source solution that was well maintained, stable, and actively growing. In addition, we required a solution that offered access to enterprise support when needed. MySQL was the right choice for us,” said Hall. “The performance, scalability, and reliability delivered by MySQL with InnoDB has been excellent.”

Learn more about Waiting Room Solutions: http://www.waitingroomsolutions.com/

Read more MySQL customer stories: http://www.mysql.com/customers/

Linas is in town for the OUGF Harmony conference 2012. The conference might of course be of some interest to user group members too. Due to the conference we also have other famous MySQLrs in town, Sheeri Kabral of OurSQLcast fame has also confirmed she will attend the user group (and maybe have OurSQLcast CD's with her?)

You can review the agenda here and register here.

You can review the agenda here and register here.

Baron's keynote

There has usually always been something that can be called a "soft keynote". Pirate Party founder Rick Falckvinge speaking at a database conference is a memorable example (I still keep in touch with him, having met him at the Hyatt Santa Clara). This year there was one less day, and therefore less keynotes. The soft keynote was therefore taken care of by Baron using some time out of Peter's opening keynote. Baron's talk was an ode to the conference itself, underscoring the meaning of the conference beyond just learning about technology. Sharing his own journey from a numb ASP.NET coder ("a good day at the office was when I changed a table based layout to pure CSS ...but nobody else seemed to care.") to his role today, he challenged people to network, make new friends and new revolutionary ideas. To me, it was a great opening keynote (and quite obviously would have made less sense on the last day of the conference). The talk, including Peter's part, is available on Percona.TV.

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MariaDB seals

Last year, when it became clear that O’Reilly wasn’t going to arrange the MySQL user conference in the future, there was a lot of discussion on who should arrange it. In the end Percona was pretty fast informing everyone that they had booked the convention center in Santa Clara to arrange the conference this year. Now with the results to hand it’s easy to say that the conference was very well arranged. Great work Percona!

The MariaDB booth was located in the .Org section of the expo hall and we experienced a huge crowd, especially on the first day (Wednesday) of the conference. Our t-shirts were really popular and we could probably have handed out even double the amount of what we had with us. Unfortunately for those in attendance, we had to put some aside for our next upcoming event in Bellingham, WA, USA 28-29th of April. It’s the LinuxFest Northwest 2012, http://linuxfestnorthwest.org. We hope to see some of you there!

We released MariaDB 5.5.23 GA on Tuesday of the conference. Apparently people just loved this news and we’ve enjoyed double our usual download rates since then.

On the SkySQL MariaDB Solutions Day on Friday the 13th, the MySQL founders Monty and David started the day with a panel and the day continued with sessions on all kinds of MariaDB and MySQL related topics. Make sure you read SkySQL’s summary, http://www.skysql.com/blogs/jenwilbur/seal-you-next-year-successful-mysql-friday-13th-santa-clara.
SkySQL has also posted pictures of the event on https://www.facebook.com/skysql.

Happy panelist Monty

During the conference we had many interesting conversations with people and businesses that we haven’t had a chance to meet before who had migrated to MariaDB. I’m certain there will be even more of these discussions this year and next.

To stay up to date with MariaDB, add yourself to the MariaDB announce list, which informs mainly about new releases. Also add yourself to the MariaDB Facebook page to get even more MariaDB news. Sign up at http://mariadb.org.