Percona Live

Percona Live
Name	Percona Live
Status	Active
Genre	Technology conference
Frequency	Annual
Venue	Varies
Location	Varies
Country	International
First	2012
Organizer	Percona

Percona Live is an annual technical conference focused on open-source database performance, scalability, and operations. It brings together practitioners, engineers, vendors, and researchers from communities around MySQL, MariaDB, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, and related ecosystems. The event features talks, tutorials, keynotes, and expo halls where companies and projects present tools, services, and research.

Overview

Percona Live centers on production deployments, performance tuning, high availability, and observability for systems built on MySQL, MariaDB, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Redis, ProxySQL, Vitess (software) and other platforms. Attendees include staff from Facebook, Google, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Netflix, Apple Inc., Twitter, LinkedIn, and open-source organizations such as OceanBase, Cockroach Labs, TimescaleDB, Citus Data, MongoDB, Inc., and Percona (company). The conference typically overlaps with adjacent events and ecosystems, drawing participants connected to Linux Foundation, OpenStack, Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Kubernetes, and Prometheus (software) communities.

History and Development

Origins trace to engineering and consulting work by Percona (company) focused on MySQL performance and support, paralleling growth in companies like Sun Microsystems and Oracle Corporation that shaped early database ecosystems. Early editions featured speakers from projects such as MariaDB Foundation, MariaDB Corporation, and contributors formerly associated with Monty Widenius and Michael "Monty" Widenius-related initiatives. Over time, content expanded to include speakers and research from institutions including University of California, Berkeley, MIT, Carnegie Mellon University, Stanford University, and corporate R&D labs at IBM, Intel, NVIDIA, and Samsung Electronics. The conference evolved alongside major releases and events: the acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle Corporation, the rise of NoSQL adopters like eBay and Flickr, and the emergence of cloud providers such as DigitalOcean and Heroku.

Conference Format and Topics

Typical programming includes keynotes, technical sessions, hands-on tutorials, lightning talks, and panel discussions. Session topics span indexing strategies influenced by work at Mozilla and Dropbox, replication techniques used at Pinterest and YouTube, storage engines pioneered by projects like InnoDB, and distributed systems research from Google Research and Amazon Research. Workshops often cover observability stacks integrating Grafana Labs, Elastic (company), Datadog, Splunk, and New Relic, Inc., while sessions address containerization with Docker (software), orchestration via Kubernetes, and CI/CD practices used by GitHub and GitLab. Security and compliance talks reference standards and institutions including OWASP, NIST, and PCI Security Standards Council.

Keynote Speakers and Notable Presentations

Keynotes have featured leaders and engineers from influential organizations and projects: speakers affiliated with Oracle Corporation, MongoDB, Inc., Google, Uber Technologies, Airbnb, Slack Technologies, Shopify, Square (company), Bloomberg L.P., and academic researchers from Princeton University and Harvard University. Notable presentations have included migration case studies from Walmart Labs, scalability research from Facebook Research, and operational postmortems referencing incidents at GitLab and Capital One. The conference has showcased talks on query optimization influenced by work at Bell Labs, columnar storage techniques from SAP SE initiatives, and cloud-native database patterns derived from Amazon Web Services whitepapers.

Community and Sponsorship

Percona Live brings together corporate sponsors, community projects, and user groups. Sponsors have ranged from start-ups to hyperscalers: Percona (company), Oracle Corporation, MongoDB, Inc., Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, IBM, Intel Corporation, Red Hat, VMware, Cisco Systems, Dell Technologies, Pure Storage, NetApp, Rackspace, DigitalOcean, Linode, LLC and companies like Timescale Inc., Cockroach Labs, MariaDB Corporation Ab, and ProxySQL. Community participation includes representation from user groups and organizations such as Meetup, Linux Foundation, Open Source Initiative, Apache Software Foundation, Free Software Foundation, and regional university clubs from University of Cambridge and University of Oxford.

Impact and Adoption

The conference has influenced operational practices adopted at major technology companies including Facebook, Google, Twitter, Netflix, Dropbox, and Spotify (service). Presentations and shared tooling have been incorporated into commercial products and open-source projects maintained by Percona (company), MariaDB Corporation Ab, MongoDB, Inc., Redis Labs, and Cockroach Labs. Techniques popularized at the event, such as advanced replication, observability integration, and cloud migration patterns, have percolated into training programs at institutions like General Assembly and corporate curricula at Accenture, Deloitte, and Capgemini.

Awards and Recognitions

Percona Live has been recognized within the tech conference circuit alongside events like Oracle OpenWorld, KubeCon, AWS re:Invent, Google Cloud Next, and Microsoft Ignite. Sessions and speakers have received community awards and mentions in media outlets including The New York Times, Wired, The Register (news outlet), ZDNet, and InfoWorld. Speakers from the conference have been honored with research awards from organizations such as ACM and IEEE for work presented in database systems and distributed computing.

Category:Technology conferences