The Voices of the ElePHPant podcast, hosted by Cal Evans, has posted their latest interview with a member of the PHP community. In their latest show Cal talks with Dave Stokes of Oracle (MySQL) recorded at the 2016 edition of the Sunshine PHP Conference.

Cal and Dave talk about the work that he does as a "MySQL Community Manager" for Oracle and how he got into it. They also talk about the importance of having "that person" to touch base with in a community (or at a company), much like Dave is for MySQL/Oracle. They both mention how happy they are that the PHP community is as open and sharing as it is, especially with things like Composer and PHPUnit.

You can listen to this latest episode either using the in-page audio player or by downloading the mp3 of the show directly. If you enjoy the episode be sure to subscribe to their feed or follow them on Twitter.

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.