This week I am in Denver attending the Percona Live conference. As part of my job I tend to focus on relational databases, especially open source relational databases, and Percona Live has become the conference that focuses on that topic. This is my first time attending.

Back when I was mainly focused on monitoring, I would go to an open source monitoring conference in Nürnberg, Germany, organized by Netways. Netways, like Percona, is a software, consulting and support company based around open source solutions, and while both companies have their own products, they welcome other projects and companies in the same space to their conference. So far Percona Live has a similar vibe to OSMC (which is a good thing).

Like many conferences the first day is devoted to tutorials. Since I don’t work directly with databases I didn’t sign up for any, but I was able to register and get my badge.

I did meet up with Vicențiu Ciorbaru from the MariaDB Foundation, and we had a nice, long lunch at a nearby restaurant. I am a big MariaDB fan and it was great to see him again.

Unfortunately, just after that lunch I came down with a case of food poisoning. I’m not sure if it was from that local bar or from the breakfast I ate in the hotel lounge, but after I threw up my spleen I curled up into a ball and slept for 15 hours. Fortunately, I now do feel much better and I’m eager for the main conference to start.