Percona Live returns to Europe on September 9–11, 2026, and MariaDB will be there!

The open source database community will gather at the Mövenpick Hotel Amsterdam City Centre for three days of technical sessions, discussions and, probably just as importantly, conversations between the people building and running open source databases every day.

MariaDB will have a strong presence this year, with sessions from MariaDB Foundation and MariaDB engineers covering server extensibility, protocol security and the ecosystem surrounding MariaDB Server.

The MariaDB story at Percona Live goes beyond our own sessions: other members of the database community will share their experiences running MariaDB.

We will also have a MariaDB booth, where you can meet us, talk directly with our engineers, see demos, discover the MariaDB Server Ecosystem Hub, and discuss what you would like to see next.

Extending MariaDB the Easy Way: A Tour d’Horizon of Server Plugins

Frédéric Descamps – lefred — MariaDB Foundation
Wednesday, September 9 — 12:05–12:35

MariaDB Server is not only a database you configure and operate. It is also a platform you can extend.

In Extending MariaDB the Easy Way: A Tour d’Horizon of Server Plugins, I will demonstrate how approachable MariaDB Server plugin development can be.

After a quick introduction to the plugin architecture, build process, installation and testing workflow, the session will explore real-world plugins covering a wide range of use cases.

These include GTID inspection and flashback helpers, disabling selected built-in SQL functions, additional utility functions, IP and CIDR manipulation, richer UUID support, SQL-driven profiling and custom data types.

The objective is not simply to showcase plugins. It demonstrates how MariaDB’s extensibility lets developers and DBAs add capabilities to the server without maintaining a long-lived fork.

If you ever thought, “I wish MariaDB could do this…”, perhaps the answer is to write a plugin!

View the session on the Percona Live website

MariaDB 11.8 Protocol Security — It Just Works

Sergei Golubchik — Chief Architect, MariaDB
Wednesday, September 9 — 17:05–17:35

Security is much better when doing the secure thing is also the easiest thing.

That is the idea behind Sergei Golubchik’s session, MariaDB 11.8 Protocol Security — It just works: Zero-configuration SSL and PARSEC authentication.

Sergei will introduce two important improvements to MariaDB’s client/server protocol security.

Zero-configuration SSL automatically encrypts MariaDB connections with end-to-end certificate verification, without requiring CA-signed certificates or traditional SSL configuration.

PARSEC authentication introduces a trustless authentication protocol with built-in protection against brute-force, replay, and precomputation attacks.

The underlying philosophy is simple: protecting database connections against man-in-the-middle attacks should not require users to become PKI experts first.

With MariaDB, secure communication should simply work.

View the session on the Percona Live website

MariaDB Is Only the Beginning: Building the Adoption Layer Around Open Source

Anna Widenius — CEO, MariaDB Foundation
Thursday, September 10 — 14:00–14:30

A successful open source database is about much more than what happens inside the database server.

Performance, features and reliability matter enormously, but users also need connectors, extensions, hosting providers, cloud platforms, application frameworks, migration tools, documentation and complete architectures around the database.

In MariaDB Is Only the Beginning: Building the Adoption Layer Around Open Source, MariaDB Foundation CEO Anna Widenius will explore what it takes to build this wider adoption layer around a mature open source database.

The session will cover initiatives including plugin and extension discovery, the MariaDB Server Ecosystem Hub, solution stacks, contributor pathways, documentation, LLM discoverability, and partnerships with complementary open source projects and infrastructure providers.

It will also address some of the more difficult questions behind ecosystem building: which collaborations actually result in adoption? Who maintains integrations over the long term? And how should an open source foundation balance community demand, partner interests, engineering capacity and sustainability?

View the session on the Percona Live website

MariaDB at Percona — and a Familiar Face

Percona will also talk about its own plans around MariaDB at this year’s event.

Tarus Balog recently joined Percona as General Manager for MariaDB. He is already familiar to the MariaDB Foundation and its community: during his time at AWS, Tarus worked closely with the Foundation and was elected a Foundation Board Observer representing AWS in December 2025.

In his MariaDB at Percona session, Tarus will discuss Percona’s current work around MariaDB and where the company sees opportunities to contribute to and support MariaDB users.

We are looking forward to hearing more about those plans in Amsterdam.

View the session on the Percona Live website

Congratulations, You’re Now a MariaDB DBA

MariaDB will also be discussed by people who don’t work for MariaDB Foundation or MariaDB — and we think that’s particularly important.

Andrew Moore and Simon Mudd will present Congratulations, You’re Now a MariaDB DBA.

The premise will sound familiar to quite a few database administrators:

You are an experienced MySQL DBA. Then somebody hands you a MariaDB environment and says, “It’s basically the same thing.”

Except that, after many years of independent development, it isn’t.

Their session covers areas where MariaDB and MySQL have evolved differently, including replication, GTIDs, SQL syntax, permissions, plugins, binlogs, undo log handling, and JSON functionality.

Perhaps even more interestingly, they’ll cover differences that can surprise a MySQL DBA and things they believe MariaDB does better.

We are particularly happy to see sessions like this at Percona Live.

A thriving open source community needs more than presentations from the people developing the software. It also needs independent experience, opinions, criticism, and feedback from those actually operating it.

View the session on the Percona Live website

Come and Meet Us at the MariaDB Booth

Of course, conferences are not only about presentations.

MariaDB will have a booth at Percona Live Amsterdam, and we would love you to stop by.

Several members of our engineering and community teams will be there, making the booth a great place to talk directly to the people working on MariaDB Server.

Have a technical question? Want to discuss something strange happening in production? Interested in a new MariaDB feature? Have an idea for a plugin? Considering migrating to MariaDB? Or just want to talk databases?

Come and see us!!

We will also have demos at the booth, giving you a chance to explore some of the technologies and projects we have been working on.

Discover the MariaDB Server Ecosystem Hub

The booth is also a great place to explore the MariaDB Server Ecosystem Hub.

MariaDB doesn’t exist in isolation. Around the server is a large ecosystem of connectors, frameworks, monitoring solutions, hosting providers, cloud platforms, backup tools, extensions, plugins and applications.

The Ecosystem Hub is our effort to make that world easier to discover.

It also includes our growing work around Solution Stacks: complete open source architectures showing how MariaDB Server can work together with other projects to solve real-world problems.

If you maintain a project that works with MariaDB and it isn’t in the Ecosystem Hub yet, come and tell us about it!

And if you are looking for a tool or integration and cannot find it, we want to hear that too.

Building an ecosystem is a community effort.

See You in Amsterdam!

Percona Live has long been an important meeting place for the open source database community.

We are looking forward to meeting MariaDB users, MySQL users, DBAs, developers, contributors, partners, and, of course, plenty of database-curious people in Amsterdam.

Come to see our sessions, and come and talk to us at the MariaDB booth.

See you in Amsterdam! 🦭