I’m sitting in the San Fransisco airport trying to get enough caffein in me to feel alive again.  A sure sign of a great conference.  Last year I live blogged the conference but this year there was so much stuff that I wanted to absorb that I failed to make time for that.  There were a ton of great sessions.  It did feel like there were fewer folks in attendance, but that only made the learning feel more personal.  This year the folks at Percona opened up the conference to encourage content across all platforms.  I wonder if that made some of the MySQL folks worry that the conference didn’t have anything to offer them.  I can tell you that there was plenty of great MySQL content.

Working in an enterprise database administration shop, the expanded content was perfect for me.  While we have historically only supported 2 platforms, we currently support 4 (about to be 5) and are constantly being pushed to support more.  This is a natural extension of modern application design and have a conference where we can hit on several platforms really helps.  We all have tight budgets these days and its almost like having 3-4 conferences in one.  But the soul of the conference is still very much MySQL.  With content geared towards first time DBAs through sessions on the InnoDB and the new MySQL Document Store, you can’t go wrong with this conference to expand your MySQL knowledge.

I am coming home with a bunch of great ideas.  The hard part now is to pick which things to work on implementing first.  Some will be changes my team can make ourselves and others will need to involve change in other teams as well.  I was very intrigued by the “chatops” idea.  I will try to see how we can integrate the concept into our operations.  I similarly was interested in the rise of integrating chat bots into database automation.  We are hitting database automation real hard right now.  Thus far our focus has been on self service APIs, but I think we will add a natural text interface into these APIs to further improve the experience for our customers.

Well, I am out of coffee so I need to run and refill the cup.  More to come on Percona Live and all the projects that come out of it.