They announced Percona Live Europe in Amsterdam 21- 22nd September.  Call for papers is now open.  They also announced the Percona Live dates for next year as April 18-21 2016.  The conference will be back in Santa Clara.

Rob Young from Percona came up and discussed Percona’s Take on Smart Data Management (What’s Next for Products and Services).  They announced the formation of a customer advisory board to provide feedback to Percona.  They see that we need to evolve or die in the MySQL space.  Data has to perform and must provide flexibility.  It is no longer acceptable for the data to shape us.  We have to shape the data.  The most important thing is how compelling the application is not how maintainable it is.

Today’s data problems do not fit a single solution shaped hole.  The solution requires hard to find talent and skillsets.  Customers have to be the focus, not the technology.  Technology is just a means to an end.  He drew attention to the jbs board and how hard it is to find talent.  An example is craigslist which is using MySQL for active listings and MongoDB for their archives.  No longer is one solution able to effectively handle all data workloads.  Then Rob shared statistics showing the explosive growth of MongoDB.  He then announced the Percona is becoming the first MySQL and MongoDB Data Performance Company.  Their acquisition of TokuDB puts them in a great position to pull this off.  For information on TokuMX see http://www.tokutek.com/tokumx-for-mongodb/.

Rob then went over a high level overview of Percona Server 5.7.  They plan to integrate TokuDB into the next version of Percona XtraDB Cluster.  Then he went over Percona’s commitment to open source solutions for the MySQL and soon the MongoDB platforms.  Rob shared Percona’s plans to leverage Percona Cloud Tools to speed up and improve their consulting and support solutions.

Amrith Kumar from Tesora came up to discuss Building Databases for the “-as-a-Service” World.  I had attended his session on Trove earlier in the week.  And Trove has a lot of promise to improve DBAs scale of influence.  Amrith compared the conflict of design and assembly line workers that build cars with the development and operation groups inside of IT.  If you have two organizations in your organization and you have conflict then combine them.  This leads to DevOps.  But hiring for DevOps is like trying to hire a superhero.  The answer is automation.  Automation improves quality and drives down costs.  This frees up your engineers for higher level issues.  It allows DBAs to work more closely with developers and provide what they need to innovate.

OpenStack and Trove allow you to provide this type of Database automation.  Not only can you use Trove to automate it can also be used to provide self service.  IT also helps automate backups and maintenance.  Trove’s intends to be a full lifecycle automation framework for database services.  Tesora works with experts on different platforms to develop their automations.  Today they support a number of different data platforms both relational and nosql.  Amrith discussed the collaboration between Percona and Tesora to make Percona products easier to automate.  He really shared a compelling presentation on why automation is important and we will look at Trove more closely.