Three weeks ago I had the privilege of attending my first Percona Live MySQL conference, which was incredible! In particular, there were two things that I found impressive about the conference.
First, was the amount of knowledge sharing and support that MySQL users provide each other; it truly is a community. Coming from EMC, I’ve attended several conferences in the past, but I’ve always considered them more of a marketing focused event, mostly spent doing product launches and company roadmaps and not much time fostering knowledge sharing and informal get-togethers: Percona Live was different. There were well thought out tutorials, information packed presentations, and keynotes rife with practical knowledge culled from the real world. I had many great conversations at our booth with people that have evaluated TokuDB or TokuMX or were planning to as soon as they got back into the office. It was also great to see, and participate in, the informal discussions at meals and during expo hours; people helping people solve problems; community at its best!
My second observation was the great attendance. The open-source community can be a bit of “Catch-22” situation; a large percentage of the users and vendors are running lean operations, and thus, are forced to control discretionary spending. This can make it difficult for the community to co-locate for events like this. However, this community is willing to go the extra mile to help and learn together. As I said in the prior paragraph, in order for a community to truly be a community, everyone needs to be invested in its furthering. My saying so is a bit redundant, but it really is awesome! Everyone coming together for their mutual benefit is great and the reason that MySQL, and subsequently the community, has thrived so much despite increased pressure from closed source vendors.
Lastly, thanks to Percona for putting on a great conference! I can only imagine the amount of planning and coordination that goes into something like that. My hat is off to all involved!
USEFUL INFO: I delivered a tutorial on evaluating TokuDB during the Tutorial sessions on Tuesday morning during which there were short labs using VMs that highlighted some of our advanced functionality. If you’d like a simple way to evaluate TokuDB in less than 30 mins, download the lab VM and guide plus my presentation via the links below and get to work!
