Percona announces MySQL conference

Percona, a MySQL consulting and support company, has announced that it will run a MySQL conference in the traditional location, Santa Clara, and at the traditional time, 10-12 April 2012. There had been a lack of clarity, according to Percona, as to whether anyone was planning a MySQL conference, so, after several months of planning, it has announced the "Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo".

The move was welcomed by some former Sun employees. Henrik Ingo wrote on his blog that, as Oracle had been boycotting and refusing to sponsor the previous O'Reilly-organised event, "the business justification for O'Reilly to keep going was not there anymore".

Others are unhappy with Percona's announcement though. Monty Widenius said he was "perplexed, confused and disappointed" by Percona's announcement. He said that he had been working with O'Reilly to set up a conference and says "This is something Percona has been very well aware of when announcing this". Although there were rumours that O'Reilly was discontinuing the conference, Widenius says that it had made no announcement. He also believes that with Percona's name attached, the event will not be perceived as vendor neutral.

Other criticism of Percona came from Guiseppe Maxia, Director of Quality Assurance at Continuent, who called on Percona to state if it was a community conference or not, and from Kaj Arno's SkySQL, who called for unity among MySQL vendors and against a branded name conference.

(djwm)