Percona, which makes a popular open-source database-as-a-service (DBaaS), celebrated its 20th birthday this week with a rebrand, a new supporting non-profit foundation – and a birthday cake shaped like a goat.
The event was held here in Mountain View, California, at the Computer History Museum, and the GOAT (Greatest Of All Time) cake was the star of the show, implying that open-source DBs are the greatest in the IT business. If you look at the number of DB deployments in production around the world, there’s no question that open source databases far outnumber proprietary systems. MySQL and PostgreSQL have ranked first and second, respectively, in the global market for several years.
The OurSQL Foundation’s key function is to provide a venue for those involved in the MySQL community to build and deploy applications that use MySQL or a broad range of compatible software, and to share them with their peers. It also aims to access knowledge and to provide feedback on future development consistently and transparently. This community non-profit will support the growth and use of MySQL as an open-source database and collaborate with all players in the market, including Oracle, to see MySQL succeed with the next generation of developers and applications, Percona co-founder Vadim Tkachenko told conference attendees.
The new foundation aims to keep open source databases independent and free from proprietary interests that threaten vendor lock-in. Since Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems in 2010, it has had control of the MySQL community development process. But in recent years, that control has begun slipping away back to the open-source community, where the database originated at Sun. Last year, Oracle laid off several hundred database engineers — many of whom worked in the MySQL camp.
“MySQL can grow much, much bigger”
“Basically, we wanted to build a future in MySQL and keep it independent,” Tkachenko told The New Stack. “We are still open to working with Oracle, but we want to build the future of MySQL independent of Oracle. MySQL can grow much, much bigger in this way, in our opinion.”
Back in the CEO job in 2025 after a few years away, Peter Farkas is articulating the company’s purpose this way: “Percona is, and always will be, a services company. It’s a moment of strategic clarity that re-centers the company in the sophisticated enterprise market as the ultimate partner for database complexity, regardless of where that data lives.”
“We are here to provide great service and not a platform as a service,” Farkas says. “This pivot is more than just a business model adjustment; it’s a re-commitment to a core strength that made Percona a powerhouse in the first place.”
The company had previously invested in building its own DBaaS platform, Everest, but the bulk of Percona’s revenue — and its reputation — came from its subscription support business. Recognizing this, the company chose to double down on what it does best: database management services.
The message is simple for the technical C-suiter: Databases are difficult, and you need an expert to handle the complexity. Percona claims to serve as the “database knowledge” company, the “easy button” for when things get tough with the largest database infrastructures.
This strategic clarity is being championed through a recent rebrand and a new tagline: “The Ways Open.” This isn’t a shallow marketing slogan; it’s a philosophical stance aimed squarely at the greatest existential threat facing enterprises today: vendor lock-in.
Farkas speaks directly to the dilemma posed by proprietary platforms — such as Oracle and similar proprietary cloud services — that use prohibitive costs to sustain or migrate data. For Percona, embracing open source is not a religion, but a “logical decision” designed to provide choice and freedom. Its developers innovate on and support established open-source staples such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MongoDB, as well as newer, crucial projects such as Valkey.
This is a high-performance, completely open-source, in-memory key-value data store created as a direct fork of Redis 7.2.4. It serves as a true drop-in replacement for caching, session storage, and message queuing workloads.
The commitment to this approach was recently demonstrated with Percona’s immediate and comprehensive enterprise-grade support for Valkey, which was launched by the Linux Foundation in response to Redis’s decision to abandon its pure open-source licensing in favor of a restrictive source-available model.
For Percona, throwing its weight behind Valkey was a powerful expression of its fundamental belief in open-source principles. By offering responsive, 24/7/365 support and migration services, Percona ensures that organizations can rely on Valkey for their memory key-value store needs, maintaining the freedom of the BSD license without vendor limitations.
The audience for Percona’s services is inherently sophisticated — IT leaders running mission-critical apps across complex hybrid and multi-cloud environments. They are the ones who recognize that database infrastructure must be secure, performant, and highly available. Percona steps in to address this with expertise across the entire database lifecycle. They provide the “smarts in-house,” Farkas said, to assist companies running on-prem, moving to the cloud, or even attempting to revert from the cloud.
Whether a customer needs a sanity check, cloud migration assistance, or full management of updates and backups, Percona covers everything the database needs.
In the age of generative AI hype, Percona maintains a remarkably grounded strategy, viewing AI as an enhancement tool rather than a replacement for its human experts.
Farkas acknowledges AI’s internal efficiency gains, particularly in support services. When a customer opens a ticket, AI can rapidly analyze large volumes of historical data and provide context, allowing support engineers and consultants to “jump right in” rather than spending time familiarizing themselves with the background.
However, Percona is taking a hard line against the industry trend of gratuitous AI product branding. It is not interested in being the company that renames all its offerings “Product Name + AI” overnight. This refusal to “sprinkle” AI onto products for no reason reflects a strong commitment to transparency and the expectation from customers that the company will “say it as it is,” Farkas says.
While Percona believes human expertise is critical for service provision, it is developing products that use AI to automate tasks such as root cause analysis, monitoring, and disaster recovery in extreme situations, effectively converting some human-to-human contact services into self-service offerings.
Percona’s market position is underpinned by an equally distinctive corporate culture. Farkas describes Percona as a “weird” or “special company” and is proud of its out-of-the-ordinary heritage. With 400 employees across more than 50 countries, Percona is completely remote.
The recent rebrand was also about aligning the external corporate image with this authentic, global personality. The company now features a goat on its front page (which explains the birthday cake), reflecting a desire to be “more bold” and “more true to ourselves,” a trait customers appreciate, especially within the open-source community.
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