Percona Live 2018 Community Report

So, after a whirlwind few days, Percona Live 2018 has been and gone. There was a great energy about the conference, and it was fantastic to meet so many open source database enthusiasts and supporters. A few things that I experienced:

• Your great willingness to share knowledge. It was a fantastic place to learn for those who have experience from a different field of technology. Almost everyone seemed to be very open and generous with their time.
• The “superstars” from our industry are not so scary. They are as willing to be open and generous with their experience and views as any of the other attendees, and equally as interested in making new discoveries.
• There aren’t many times you can sit down to a (community) dinner, to share food and anecdotes with people from USA, UK, Germany and Armenia at the same time. I thoroughly enjoyed the company, and wish there were more opportunities for similar encounters. Thanks to Pythian for setting that up.
• My Percona colleagues are wonderful, committed human beings with more than a passing interest in music – the Percona Sessions have got to happen…
• That you can run a very long way in a day between the Santa Clara Convention Center and the Hyatt Regency Hotel.

I had very many positive conversations with delegates. You offered any criticisms along with a suggestion of how we should tweak things for the better. Our community is a creative, generous, problem-solving machine, though I shouldn’t be surprised at that.

So, with only a few more duties to complete, I’d like to thank you for your company. For those that did not make it to this year’s event, I hope that you might be persuaded to join us in the future — either at Percona Live Europe 2018 or at Percona Live 2019.

Packt Prizes

Our media sponsor, Packt, generously provided us with three free ebooks and two free instruction videos as prizes for delegates:

1. Mastering MongoDB 3.x
2. MySQL 8 Cookbook
3. MongoDB Administrator’s Guide
4. Elastic Databases and Data Processing with AWS [Video]
5. AWS Administration – Database, Networking, and Beyond [Video]

There are another 10 titles for which we can offer delegates a 50% discount: you should have received your emails. Thanks are due again to Packt.

Community Blog

While I have your attention, I’d like to let you know about the forthcoming Percona community blog. Having been some time in the planning, this is starting really soon, and is like a year-round, online, Percona Live. We already have some keen writers for this, but if you would be interested in creating content (whether written, podcast or webcast) for the community blog, then please get in touch. The brief is very wide — as long as your submission is relevant to the open source database community then it would be welcome.

Finally, I would like to invite feedback on how to make the event shine even brighter — please drop me an email if you have suggestions or ideas. Meanwhile, I hope you enjoy these photographs of the MySQL Community Awards Winners, presented at PL18. You can read more about this community initiative.

Perhaps you’ll be able to join us in Frankfurt in November? Time to start thinking about those submissions for the call for papers!

Or perhaps next year at Percona Live Open Source Database Conference in 2019 – wherever it may be!

Photographs: Randy Tunnell Photography