Percona Live Online Agenda Slot: Tue 19 May • New York 12:30 p.m. • London 5:30 p.m. • New Delhi 10:00 p.m.

There are many good databases out there. Picking the right database for your project is never easy. There are technical criteria, business criteria, perhaps even ethical criteria. In this keynote, MariaDB Foundation CEO Kaj Arno will present his - obviously completely impartial - view of the process. Should you pick a database in the cloud or on premise? Should you pick an Open Source database or a closed-source one? And if you pick relational open source databases, how should you choose between MariaDB, MySQL and PostgresSQL? Expect the recommendation to not always be “go with MariaDB 10.4”. However, do expect to get a view of how the MariaDB Foundation sees its role, in relation to MariaDB Server, to MariaDB Corporation, to its other members (Microsoft, IBM, Service Now, Alibaba, Tencent, Booking.com, et al.), and above all, to the community of database developers and users.

Can you expect a partial person to come with a neutral comparison between competitors? No. But it can still be logical and insightful. Can you expect such a comparison to be exciting? Yes. And it can be entertaining, too. Why? Because I am starting from the basic reasoning of “Cui bono”: Who benefits? From what? What is the likely reasoning by the actors in the database industry? And what is their actual behavior?

Developers, DBAs, sysadmins. Anyone who needs to decide how to make data persistent in their apps. Where should data be stored? How should one even think about the choice process? Technology issues, business issues, the lot.

On the full agenda, all the keynoters are great! The last few PeterZ presentations I’ve seen have been wonderful combinations of deep technical expertise and logical business reasoning. Matt Asay is always insightful. And there is a lot to be learned from Bruce Momjian and Frédéric Descamps.

I’m also looking forward to MySQL on Google Cloud, by Leo Tolstoy and my former colleague Jeremy Cole. And speaking of former colleagues, Colin’s MariaDB Server talk is clearly going to be an exciting one, a different angle to what I will touch upon in my keynote.

Last and by no means least: I already attended an earlier version of Valerii Kravchuk’s super-cool tracing and performance debugging presentation, but it was so good that I will want to look at it again. ∎