 Okay, welcome back everyone, this is theCUBE, SiliconANGLE's flagship program. We go out to the events, extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. I'm John Jeff Kelly, my co-host, the chief research officer for Wikibon's big data practice. We are here with Peter Zeitz, the co-founder and CEO of Percona. This is his show, Percona Live. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. So you guys have over 1,000 people attending. It's not a sexy show relative to Microsoft's Big Build in San Francisco, where they're interested in the iPhone, not iPhone, the Windows iPhone clone wannabe, and other events, but it's a lot of very important event because developer action right now is all about the data. We saw the NoSQL databases actually come onto the scene very rapidly with the advent of big data and fast data and mobile computing, but my SQL's not going away. I mean, if anything, it's escalated in importance at the scale level, at many levels, and you're seeing analytics being powered by some structured database, you got to roll that data up into some schema. Maybe some schema less designs come down the road for handling the new data types? No problem, but SQL's not going away. My SQL in particular. So with that in mind, what is the focus of this show? Why is this important? Share it with the folks. Why Percona Live is such an important show? Well, I believe that Percona Live is important because this is this sort of big tent. We really keep it open. We invite all kind of players here, wherever our partners or our competitors where their opinion matches our or different from us. And I think because we keep it real, that is very much appreciated both by our attendees, our speakers, and our sponsors. What is the, just share the numbers of some people here. What are some of the vendors here? Give some examples of the kind of people that are showing up here. So if you think about the MySQL, those days there are three major MySQL variants. There is obviously like the true MySQL by Oracle and we have tons of folks from Oracle Development Team participating here, giving talks, including Thomas Olin, who runs the engineering at Oracle. We also have their MariaDB team here with a lot of folks, which is the second variants. And they actually have chosen this show to time the, do the GA release for their new major MariaDB tent, which we are very proud of. And of course, there is Percona with our products, which are also well presented here. What are some of the challenges people have and what's the opportunities with scale? When you look at MySQL, you've seen all the great ones that have taken Open Source MySQL and built companies around it because they didn't have the big bucks like Facebook when they started. Obviously Google and Amazon and LinkedIn, Twitter, they're all Open Source guys. Those guys are kind of a black swan, unicorn, whatever we want to call them. They're just unique. They're like, they're eating glass, they're spitting out nails. They're hardcore dudes. Now, the normal market, Blamstack Developers, they're building software, doing stuff in the enterprise. They've used Mongo in the past. It's worked well. But everyone's hitting this glass ceiling. So I got to ask you the question. What is the main thought leadership today around breaking that glass on performance and taking scale to the next level? Well, I would say for MySQL, I like to see what there are two kinds of applications. And I will call them simply large and small, right? If the large applications, these are like Facebook, or even at a little bit smaller scale. And those... Facebook's a large application. Check the box. Yeah, so, and those things have to have a very advanced technology for scaling. They need to scale to large amount of service implementing technologies like Sharding, Cache, and they use a lot of very advanced stuff. I think it's already has been proven that the MySQL can be used to build application of a really extreme scale. And for those guys, the challenge right now comes, I believe, in two-fold. First one is efficiency, because in the Facebook scale, when you're running tens, maybe even hundreds of thousands of service of MySQL, every 10% is millions of dollars worth of cost savings. So you really try to squeeze as much from existing hardware as possible. The second is efficiency in terms of automation, right? You can always find what even those very famous companies have a hard time recruiting the qualified DVAs and their operational team usually cannot grow as quickly as amount of their applications and database instances they're running. So there is a lot of heavy investment, how we can automate things, how we can do more, manage our databases better with the smaller stuff. This is all what comes to the larger applications, right? And then another trend that I believe is the MySQL with application I would call small. Now, small doesn't necessarily mean like small as your home DVD collection, right? It may be actually a quite significant scale of application but which you can still run from their relatively simple architecture with single MySQL server or maybe very simple replication setup. And because of recent hardware advances, you can run phenomenal amount of traffic from those kind of applications. We have companies which generates many tens of millions of revenue from essentially this kind of setup or supporting internal website for a company of 200,000 employees, stuff like that. This I think is a very interesting trend. Let me ask you a question. Tell me how to phrase it. Okay, so here's how I'll phrase this one. What are the biggest things for the folks out there? Share with the audience out there. What is the biggest thing that they may not know about what's going on in the MySQL world that hasn't hit the mainstream yet that you guys know in the thought leader, geek circles here under the hood? What's happening and what's next? What's the most important thing that's going to come out of this sea change? We heard from Fusion IO around nonvolatile memory compression. You mentioned sharding. There's just a technique in managing data but some things are happening. But what is it that people don't know today that they should know about what's happening? Yes, well, I think it's the most exciting thing in MySQL right now is what there is a lot of very rapid innovation happening and in a lot of cases this is driven by competition. I think in MySQL, right now even MySQL at Oracle is moving much faster than ever before partly because of the resources Oracle have available and partly because of the competition from folks like Marie Dibi and Percona server. And I think that's competition really benefits MySQL users. Another interesting announcement which a few of folks may have heard about is there something called a web scale SQL which is an engineer cooperation between Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn which may be somewhat competing, right? But they have chosen to work together on getting the next generation of MySQL variant for an extreme scale and I'm very excited about how much great stuff could come out of that. So talk about that a little bit more. You know, it sounds like, I mean clearly MySQL is still extremely important part of their infrastructure and they're the way they support their applications. Do you think kind of the work they're doing together is going to have an impact on more traditional enterprises or is this pretty much going to stay with the large scale companies or do you see us moving to a point where eventually as we've seen with other technologies like Kadoop some of the things developed at these at the large web scale companies make their way into the enterprise? Or are we a long way from that? Yes, well, when they're speaking about the MySQL and web scale SQL is a product focused particular on their MySQL like environment, right? So I believe there is going to be a fair amount of changes integrated in the mainstream MySQL in the Oracle branch. In fact, they have already taken some of the patches from Facebook or Twitter and Google and integrating that in the main line. And I think also some of the changes may be very specific to how Google use MySQL or Facebook use MySQL, right? Which will remain in their respective branches. And I think that's fine. Now you mentioned there Kadoop, Mongo and other technologies. I think it's very important to understand but even though some of those companies they want to position like they are replacing MySQL. I believe in majority of cases they run alongside MySQL, right? Take a look at Facebook, for example. They run a bit of everything. There is a lot of MySQL there but you can find there Cassandra, Mongo, Memcache, a lot of other technologies. And I think that is what really makes the open source data management technology so exciting because when you have a single vendor approach, right? You say, hey, I am with Oracle, right? And they want me to do everything with Oracle. Your application series Oracle, QNIS Oracle, Cache and Oracle. That is not so an open source environment. MySQL is great for certain set of things but not for everything. And we have to all recognize that and there is room to use Hadoop and MongoDB, Redis, Memcache for other things. And we are finding ways right now how to operate those technologies together effectively. And I think that is one of the great trends happening right now. What do you think about what's going on in the cloud mobile world relative to data? Honestly, I'm higher up the stack and a lot of the databases have always been the enabler for that. So database, it's a cool time to be a database guy right now. I mean, yeah, I have to say, one of my degrees in computer science is in database design and the other one's in operating systems and hell, I never told anyone I was a database guy. It's like, ah, I don't want business. But it wasn't a sexy degree back in the 80s, right? In the 90s. But now it's all the rage because of all the enablement. How is databases changing today? Is it the intersection with NoSQL? Is it the connectors? Is it the coexistence? Is it the open source, all of the above? What's your take on that? Oh, I think there's a lot of trends out there, right? Like, I will start with the last one, the open source, right? I think when it comes to computing, the open source really has proven itself, right? We have the open source operating system for a while, MySQL, open source database, a lot of innovation, where I've been at Hadoop or MongoDB Cassandre, these are all open source technologies, right? Which is very important. Cloud is an important factor. From a different perspective, I think cloud really changed how a lot of innovation happens. A lot of startups can start with the application much faster and less expensive than ever before and be a lot more agile as well. Cloud also allows us to really have a dynamic scaling, right? So you can go from one zero to 100 in a matter of minutes if you have to and that allows us to build a newer, much more effective application, especially for some applications which are seasonal or IOS spikes of activity. Now, you mentioned the mobile and I think there is another interesting trend which drives a lot of challenge in the database. We are generating much more data those days. This data can be not structural and a lot of that data is also location specific. If you think about that, this ability to support your location when it comes to the data was one of the great the focus of a lot of modern technologies like MongoDB, for example, does that pretty well. And I'm also excited to see what my school is catching up. One of the announcements Oracle has done yesterday was MySQL 5.7 release with special high-performance support for location searches, which looks like a minor thing that's very important enabling factor for mobile technologies and investment. So another kind of important topic I think when you're talking about open source technology, shifting gears a little bit, talk us a little bit about Percona's business model. So when you're in the open source world and you're providing services and some level of some software, it was over the question of, okay, what do we open source? What do we charge for? How do you make those kind of determinations? What's Percona's approach? And is that, it sounds like that's a really critical question when you're trying to play in the open source community. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And when you look at the Percona approach has been a full throttle open source, right? If you take a look at that. Our technologies like Percona Server, Percona XRDB cluster, Percona Toolkit, Percona XRBucket, these are all open source. And in many cases we have investment into development technology which are alternative to the close source technologies which Oracle provides. For example, there is a rather expensive in mySQL enterprise backup, but there is also Percona XRBucket, which is the alternative from Percona, which is completely open source. Now, you will see a lot of features in the mySQL enterprise such as support for very high level of connections called enterprise scalability or integration with their active directory and other authentication system which is commercial only extension Oracle but it exists as an open source solution in Percona Server. And I think that is very important for us to really push the open source forward as much as we can. Now, at the same time, we are not the open source zealots and then there are solutions exist which are proprietary which we can bring into our customers, we use them. So for example, our support customers have access to their Monio platform which we extended with additional what we call Percona advisors to really empower the DBA in their, a lot of the companies. For our Percona XRB cluster support, we have a provider with our support script which is a script from the best of breed software called Cluster Control done by several Nines and I think that is a great thing and there is a place both for open source and a proprietary software. I want to get your final thoughts here as we wind down the segment on just give us an update on the company. You guys have a lot of customers. Just give us a quick stats. Give us the, how many customers, how many employees, how's the funding? You guys feel good about yourself and Intel invests $700 million this week and you guys, give us some data. Come on, share with us. Yes, sure. Yes, Intel invests $700 million in you? No, no, we wouldn't take that. Too low of an evaluation. Yes, so we've been around for about seven and a half years. So the company was started by myself and by Dintka Chentka. We previously work in the engineering team in my school. We also have a pretty hardcore ground in the woods when we need to be. The company is about 120 people right now and we have what is called the distributed company. And truly so, we have people in more than 20 countries. Do you have a GitHub handle? Yeah, there's the corner. Okay, you personally? Oh, me? Well, I have a login but I don't share. Oh, you don't share public code? Okay. Yeah, yeah, so. So we can't look at your code? Well, I will have to tell, I don't go too much, right? I found out, coding is way too slow, right? I rather like to come up with wonderful ideas and then have. Have someone else code them. Have someone else code them, right? That's my thing. I see a couple thousand customers, seven years funding. Did you guys self-funded yourselves? Yes, it is self-funded bootstrapped so there is no outside investors or outside. Zero today. Zero today, yes. Congratulations. Thank you. We have no outside investors. No one can fire us except the customers. Yes, indeed. That's what I like. Well, you're one of us. Okay, any other stats you want to share? Employees distributed? 120, 120 employees, 22 the country or so. So that's, that's it. We have the three major business areas we provide. It's MySQL support, consultant and also remote-based services. All right, so the hardest question I'm going to ask you is, where do you guys decide to have your big meetings? Which country? U.S., somewhere else? Oh, well. Do you guys have everyone around the country? Do you guys have that debate internally? Yeah, well, we've been running pretty large company meetings until, until recently when it becomes too hard to pull off and too challenging for our customers. And we try to mix fun and pleasure so then you can go to, we had meetings in places like Mexico as well as in Turkey and Egypt because before all of those events, right? Of course, yeah, off-site planning events. We've had those too. Not in Egypt though, Jeff, we got to get on that. Well, we might want to wait till a little- Turkey's got some good- Things settled down a little bit, part of the world, I don't know. Well, thanks so much for coming. I really appreciate it, Peter. Lights, welcome to theCUBE. Great event, great to be here our first time here at your event. We'd love what you're doing. Obviously a big proponent of open source, MySQL, growing up again, going to scale, web scale, SQL, obviously a big, big flashpoint for the industry with all the big guys who use data coming together to say, hey, we can share information, take you home to the level for performance. Thanks for putting on the event. Thanks for having us. This is theCUBE, we'll be right back after this short break. We're here live in Silicon Valley in the heart of Silicon Valley and Santa Clara Convention Center for Percona Live. We'll be right back.