Percona Live 2026 returned to Mountain View, California this month, bringing together database professionals, open source advocates, and practitioners for what the company describes as a no-nonsense, hands-on event.

Held at the Computer History Museum (nice people, great museum, so-so conference center top section), the conference was initially anchored by a keynote from new Percona CEO Peter Farkas, who set the tone early.

Promising to “avoid all the fluff” that typically gets put on show at so many technology conferences, Farkas talked about the reality of how AI is going to impact the open source database world. 

Did AI Kill The DBA?

Although his colleague Peter Zaitsev, founder of Percona has said that “AI is killing the traditional DBA, but it is reinventing the database”… Farkas likes to temper this suggestion slightly. He says that, yes, in a way, AI is killing off our previous notion of the database administrator, but DBAs will rise up through the change and still be in place, the difference (for him) is that AI will create (sorry, has created) a whole new breed of data flows and that is what DBAs are going to have to weave into the way they approach operations now.

Ultimately, in the view of both Farkas and Zaitsev, we cannot fully predict the future of what will happen, but we can say that DBAs will find their most repetitive chore-type work now being automated and, crucially, they will also be able to rise up and work on higher value tasks.

Talking about why attendees might consider coming to any Percona Live event in the first place, Farkas said openly that he thinks it’s “not about the talks, keynotes and presentations” i.e. it’s all about user-level practitioner interactions and the opportunity to connect with like-minded peers.

“If you see a talk presented this year that you think is bullshit and presents things that are not feasible, then you need to say this out loud, because this is the ethos that we need to uphold in the open source community,” said Farkas.

Key Event News

The event was staged to showcase the launch of the OurSQL Foundation, Valkey’s 9.1.0 release and themes ranged from AI-driven data management and self-driving database architectures to licensing pressures and cloud sovereignty. Guest keynote speaker Andy Pavlo offered a characteristically sharp perspective on the database industry’s cyclical tendencies, while Percona’s Zaitsev surveyed the broader ecosystem. 

Throughout it all, the message was consistent: the open source community is at an inflection point, and the conversations happening here are ones the industry needs to have.

Other keynote sessions included “What Percona delivers for MySQL, and what’s coming next”, presented by Michal Nosek, Percona; “One Platform, Three Engines: Open Source DBaaS Patterns on Kubernetes”, presented by Kate Obiidykhata, Percona and George Kechagias, Percona; “From Our Customers to the Community: How AWS Contributes Upstream”, presented by Madelyn Olson, AWS… and then Zaitsev’s annual “where we stand today with open source database technologies overview” session.

Pointing the audience to consider what he calls the rise of self-driving databases in the era of AI, Zaitsev defines the five steps to this new reality as follows:

• Level 1: Manual traditional databases
• Level 2: AI-assisted database with some autonomous functions arising
• Level 3: Partially automated database, with less human management interaction required
• Level 4: Highly automated databases, but humans still in the loop
• Level 5: Full-automation autonomy, as it sounds, human DBAs now repurposed on higher-value tasks

OurSQL Foundation

Announced at Percona Live 2026, the OurSQL Foundation is a vendor-neutral MySQL community initiative formed to support organizations, users and partners in the MySQL space.

“This Foundation will provide a platform to promote and support MySQL as a database, fostering collaboration across everyone looking to contribute to the broad MySQL ecosystem,” said Vadim Tkachenko, co-founder at Percona. 

The foundation will provide a place for those involved in the MySQL community to build and deploy applications that use MySQL (or compatible software that works with it) to share with their fellow users and grasp the chance to learn and offer feedback on development transparently.

Tkachenko has further stated that by bringing the community together under the banner of an independent Foundation, a new chance is created to demonstrate that MySQL has a valid and vibrant future ahead of it. “The OurSQL Foundation will be a neutral organization that will support MySQL as a technology, helping the community as a whole to grow and succeed in parallel with Oracle’s renewed focus on MySQL community development,” he added.

Valkey 9.1.0 Arrives

Valkey 9.1.0 has arrived and the team says it delivers improvements in security, performance, and more.  This latest release includes new functionality and improvements for security, observability, performance, efficiency, and tooling from over 80 contributors. Let’s take a look at a few of the highlights in this release.

Release 9.1 strengthens Valkey’s security capabilities with several important enhancements:

Numbered Database-level Access Control: Valkey enables stronger multi-tenant solution isolation and more granular security policies by allowing administrators to restrict which commands a user may execute with per-database granularity. Previously, ACL rules could control which commands a user could execute and which keys they could access, but that access applied to any database. 

With database-level ACLs, administrators and operators can now scope user permissions to specific databases.

Lua Moved To A Module

Valkey 9.1 moves the Lua scripting engine into its own module, decoupling it from the core server. By extracting Lua into a module, Valkey reduces its security surface area and gives operators the option to disable Lua entirely if it is not required. To make it easier to understand which scripting engines are loaded, the  INFO command has a new reply section named Scripting Engines.

In terms of TLS Improvements: Valkey now displays TLS certificate expiration dates via the INFO command, making it easier to detect and avoid outages caused by expired TLS certificates. 9.1 also includes automatic background reloading of TLS certificates to enable rotation without downtime and support for TLS authentication using certificate Subject Alternate Name (SAN) URIs for easier mTLS integration.

New observability features in Valkey 9.1.0 make it easier to understand how your server is performing:

Main and I/O Thread Usage Metrics: CPU usage metrics alone don’t provide enough insight into how loaded a Valkey server is, as the main thread and I/O threads will wait for work in a busy loop that can appear as near 100% CPU utilization, even if the threads are relatively idle. New cumulative metrics for main and I/O thread usage make it easier to monitor your server’s true load and tune accordingly.

That’s A Wrap (Up) 

So Percona Live 2026 arrived in Mountain View with a refreshingly “no-fluff” mandate, tackling the existential dread surrounding AI’s impact on the database administrator. 

While some fear the “death” of the traditional DBA, the sentiment here suggests a sophisticated metamorphosis into a new breed of data-flow champions. From the birth of the vendor-neutral OurSQL Foundation to Valkey 9.1.0’s modular Lua decoupling, the focus remains on practitioner-level reality over marketing gloss. Open source is at an inflexion point, shifting toward highly automated, self-driving architectures.