Information Management: Luca Olivari's thoughts on managing both Structured and Unstructured Data

With a few days of delay, I want to share my impressions about Red Hat's Open Source Day presented in Rome on June 10, 2008.

The Event

Event was organized really well, Red Hat took responsibility of everything and all went smoothly toward the end. There were more than 200 attendees and the hall was crowded of Open Source enthusiasts, customers and others waiting for interesting speeches and a juicy agenda. General impression was very good, a lot of attention from both community attendees and customers willing to deeper their Open Source knowledge and listening to shining or emerging stars in the field.

A rich agenda gave everyone a bunch of new ideas to think about.

MySQL/Sun

Luca Gargaglione catalyzed attendees attention by explaining How and Why MySQL is the world's most popular open source database. He gave us a quick overview of the diffusion, offer and markets served by MySQL. The crowd laughed knowing that MySQL is used even in the Easter Island (also known as Rapa Nui in the Rapa Nui language). You can take a look at the presentation (in Italian) here.

During the entire day a lot of people were coming at our booth asking tough questions about future directions, possible use of MySQL and synergies between Sun products and MySQL RDBMS.

Conclusion

In Italy we are usually a bit skeptic about innovation, but this wasn't the case. A lot of enthusiasm, interest and fun pervaded the entire day. I came at home with a deeper understanding of Open Source and with a sincere desire of being an advocate (together with my company) of Open Source Software... and I hope to find many, many, many of us with the same desire.