Reflections from PerconaLive 2022 Austin, TX

As a long-term Perconalive veteran, the most recent Perconalive was more than an Open Source Database conference. It meant to be reunited with thought leaders of open source databases; it meant to be there, learn and listen from others, share ideas, and see the real people finally. 

I have been in many Perconalives before, both North America and Europe. The general theme of the conference used to be MySQL and its ecosystem. Over the years, as Percona established businesses around other open source databases, mainly MariaDB, MongoDB, and Postgresql, the conference was named after the polyglot theme. Of course, conferences worldwide have been canceled or low attendance for the past two years due to the pandemic and covid-19 side effects of international travel. Having an in-person conference was a challenge. The last conference I attended was KubeCon; LA 2021 had a similar stance on people being cautious, recently infected, or carrying the risk of the virus before or after the conference. These are the facts we can’t avoid talking about.

There were many highlights and new players or trending topics during the conference. We were by nature interested in ClickHouse and its popularity. But there were others. 

  • Victoria Metrics – High-Performance Open Source Time Series Database & Monitoring Solutions
  • FerretDB – Open Source MongoDB alternative
  • PlanetScale – MySQL compatible serverless database platform
  • PingCap – TiKV is highly scalable, low latency, and an easy-to-use key-value database.

Besides these, there were many recent announcements around the open source community.

  • Percona has announced a Platform utilizing its Kubernetes Operators and PMM (Percona Monitoring and Management) tool. 
  • The state of Dolphin had Oracle MySQL Operator for Kubernetes 
  • MariaDB Scaling – From Single Instance to Multiple Clusters
  • Looking Ahead at PostgreSQL 15
  • Altinity has announced ClickHouse Sink Connector

The Books; as usual, there were popular books have been published during the pandemic, and it was hard to follow when everyone was remote.

To start with MySQL books, we had the following recent books related to talks and interactions. All of them were by O’Reilly Media.  

  1. Efficient MySQL Performance, Daniel Nichter. I am personally happy to have known Daniel and discuss the book and its topics. I’m also lucky to have a signed copy of his book. I’ll be donating this book after reading it to another MySQL enthusiast. 
  2. Learning MySQL, 2nd Edition, Vinicius M. Grippa, Sergey Kuzmichev. Although Sergey didn’t make it to the conference it was great seeing and spending time with Vinicius. I have reviewed and praised this book earlier it’s such a win for the ecosystem. 
  3. MySQL Cookbook, 4th Edition, Sveta Smirnova, Alkin Tezuysal. As a co-author of this book, I was thrilled to see the first talk held by Sveta at this conference, making people aware of the upcoming edition. As of the conference, we have the book in the pre-release stage, and the talk held by Sveta had a great preview of some of the favorite chapters. 

Fun things also happened during the conference. MySQL booth hosted by Lefred had a game that allowed for MySQL Exam Voucher.   As of the writing of this blog I had already received confirmation from Frederic and donated this to a known MySQL enthusiast.

We’ve also had some Podcast sessions with Dave Stokes in the absence of Matt Yonkovit, which should be published in the coming weeks. 

Long story short, in conclusion, it was a tremendous in-person conference. The sad news is there will be no Perconalive Europe this year; instead, Percona is handling road-show events. See you next time with much ClickHouse content and more from ChistaDATA

About Alkin Tezuysal 4 Articles
Alkin Tezuysal has extensive experience in open source relational databases, working in various sectors for large corporations. With over 25 years of industry experience, he has acquired skills for managing large projects from the ground up to production. For the past decade, he's been focused on e-commerce, SaaS, and MySQL technologies. Alkin has managed and architected database topologies for high-volume sites. He has several years of experience in 24X7 support and operational tasks and improving database systems for major companies. He has led global operations teams on Tier 1/2/3 support for MySQL customers. He currently holds the EVP - Global Services position at fast-growing startup ChistaDATA Inc. He's also co-author of the MySQL Cookbook 4th Edition.