You might not think Oxford was the place to be for the latest, greatest and most interesting conferences about web development.

 

You'd be wrong.

 

Local digital agency White October brought the new - and very shiny - All Your Base Conference to the Saïd Business School on November 23rd 2012. Following the success of jQuery UK (also at the SBS), their Technical Manager, John Ward, wanted to create 'a database conference for web developers'. And he did a very good thing.

 

Speakers ranged from the hilarious and insightful Brian Leroux (phonegap developer at Adobe and creator of the marvellous Lawn Chair browser storage engine) to the delightful and much-loved Monty Widenius (creator of and benevolent father to MySQL), who presented a comprehensive slaughtering of Oracle's 'improvements' to MySQL and told everyone why they should be using his new fork - MariaDB.

 

and_there_was[

 

       Lisa Phillips => twitter (where they use a lot of MySQL),

       Alvin Richards =>10Gen / MongoDB,

       Dale Harvey => PouchDB (offline storage for web apps),

       Craig Kersteins =>Heroku (talking about Postgres),

       Luca Garulli => OrientDB (a graph database - think likes and facebook),

       Brandon Keepers => GitHub (cool name, too),

       Matt Heitzenroder => Basho,

       Tim Moreton => Acunu (hosted Casandra on steroids)

 

]

 

From which you can get a taste of the sheer variety of databases and approaches on show. And there lies the real value of a well-structured conference like this one - you get exposed to a whirlwind of new ideas and possibilities that on their own are useful - taken together can completely change the way you approach your applications and their design. Each topic bounces off and gives a leg-up to the others. It's powerful stuff.

 

The venue is fantastic. The large foyer at the front provides a great place to meet other developers and get the swag on offer from the (un-intrusive) sponsors. The after-party at the Jam Factory was great fun. The AYB mascot owns.

 

I can really recommend All Your Base if you have anything to do with databases, or web applications that use databases.

 

It's good value, useful, and loads of fun.

 

Main screen turn on.