The Cloudways blog has posted an interview today with Dave Stokes, the MySQL Community Manager at Oracle and frequent speaker at PHP conferences and user groups.

Dave Stokes is MySQL Community Manager at Oracle and a certified MySQL 5.6 database administrator. He has vast experience of DB administration and has been MySQL Certification Manager at SUN. In his interview with Cloudways, he talks about the start of his career, compares MySQL with MariaDB and other MySQL forks in some detail, also talks about NoSQL in detail and, in the end, he gives wonderful advice to students. Enjoy the wide-ranging interview.

Dave answers questions about:

• How he got started as the MySQL Community Manager
• His suggestions for choosing one fork of MySQL for you needs
• How MySQL competes with other database types (like MongoDB)
• Where people can follow the MySQL community
• His advice to beginners and students looking to build a career in database development

You can read Dave's answers to these and more questions in the full interview.