Random thoughts after Percona Live

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Percona Live Europe 2017 has ended. As always it’s been a great opportunity to hear great technical talks, ask questions, get in touch with people, drink beer, collect nice & useless gadgets. And, on a personal note, to meet former colleagues and former customers, some of which I never met before. And even joke with a customer about my sleepy voice when I had to start all my Monday mornings with a Skype call with him, at 8, at home. I revealed him I tried everything, including singing, but my voice didn’t improve. Oh, well, if he messaged me after I left Percona, I probably did a decent job.

Here are some completely random thoughts in random order.

  • MariaDB wasn’t there. There was a single talk, officially from the Foundation (I can’t really distinguish the two entities, and I’m not alone). They have their own conference, M18 will be the second edition. So most people have to choose if to attend Percona or Maria. The only consequence I care about is that they’re splitting the community and making every part weaker. As I wrote for the BSL time ago, I can only hope they will change their mind.
  • Tarantool wasn’t there. So bad, I believe in it.
  • Technologies that are growing fast or strongly promoted: ClickHouse, ProxySQL, Vitess, MyRocks storage engine. Wow.
    • But I’ve attended a very nice talk on a TokuDB real life story. Don’t underestimate it.
  • At Percona Live talks, you often hear questions about performance and quality. With MariaDB talk, I was the only one to ask these things (and actually my questions were almost a DoS attack, sorry Vicentiu). I’m not saying that MariaDB has not quality, I’m saying that users have probably a different approach.
  • Sharding is becoming a hot topic.
  • Open source philosophy is consolidating and expanding. It goes far beyond licenses and marketing claims, it is the attitude and pleasure to collaborate and do things that, without a community, wouldn’t be as strong.
  • As remarked by PZ, the first criteria for choosing a technology is usability. There are very good reasons for this, given the current complexity of big or even medium infrastructures. But it’s still a bit dangerous.
  • If you don’t have a reason to be there next year, I’ll give you one: Irish red beer.

Enjoy.
Federico

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