What to expect from Percona Live 2026

Know your (computer) history

Appealing to all nerds (which we appreciate a lot), the Computer History Museum is filled with the artefacts (hardware-based artefacts obviously, but with many of the devices having managed software artefacts in their time) and so the venue provides an arguably fitting backdrop to talk about how to keep open source databases genuinely open in an era where every hyperscaler on the planet would rather you just pay for their managed service.

Percona founder Peter Zaitsev talks openly about the challenges that go on in his firm’s mission. This event’s homepage promises us that this is “not a marketing stage, vendor showcase, or corporate slide deck parade” – and knowing Zaitsev’s honesty, that’s almost certainly true.

The event programme includes some 43 sessions and seven workshops that will aim to talk attendees through the “full alphabet of open source data” i.e. every technology from MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, MariaDB, Valkey, ClickHouse and cloud-native data technologies. 

Session selection 

Sessions will cover areas (after Zaitsev’s keynote) including the use of AI-powered alert analysis on ClickHouse databases in cloud environments; the inside track on Migrating 155 SQL Server Databases to PostgreSQL at scale (which will be part of a healthcare success story); and accelerating cloud migrations with MyDumper – a high-performance, multi-threaded MySQL backup tool providing faster logical exports and consistent snapshots compared to traditional single-threaded utilities.

There’s also TLS for self-managed MongoDB; How your AI DBA will hallucinate during an outage (spoiler alert here, this has to be one of the favourite sessions); and a session on surviving database migrations.

Looking back at 2025, over the course of the last year, Percona has introduced new open source capabilities, broadened its expert support offerings, welcomed key new executives, earned multiple industry awards and deepened adoption among global enterprises. 

Key product updates

Among the top-line key product updates over the last year (which will no doubt be used as foundational subject matter for Percona Live 2026) we can list the following:

• Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) for PostgreSQL: The company introduced the first fully open source implementation of TDE for PostgreSQL, enabling organizations to meet strict security and compliance requirements without relying on proprietary extensions or licenses.
• 24×7 Enterprise Support for Valkey: Expanded enterprise-grade support to Valkey, providing customers with a trusted, open alternative as licensing changes reshaped the Redis ecosystem and increased demand for community-led solutions.
• Percona Bundles: Launched fixed-scope consulting and support offerings that give teams predictable access to Percona experts for performance optimization, operational readiness, and scaling modern workloads, including AI-driven applications.
• Advancements for Kubernetes Operators: Improved and expanded operators for cloud-native, enterprise-ready MySQL, MongoDB, and PostgreSQL clusters on Kubernetes–including native MySQL Group Replication support for Kubernetes with the GA release of Percona Operator for MySQL.

“As we reflect on 2025’s achievements and the past two decades of industry leadership, it’s clear that an open source-first approach delivers real, measurable value to our customers. In 2026, we will continue to push the boundaries of that value,” said Peter Farkas, CEO of Percona. “I’m excited to lead Percona through this latest chapter, keeping innovation, service excellence, and a commitment to the open source community at the heart of everything we do for many more years to come.”

We’re ready to get into the Percona open source database mindset now then… and do so at a great venue for geek, nerds and data science lovers of all kinds.

There’s even a booth crawl and the possible promise of a hot dog, what’s not to like?