At the end of day 1 of this week’s #PerconaLive event, co-founder and CEO of Percona, Peter Zaitsev, joined John Furrier and Jeff Kelly in theCUBE to discuss this year’s event, developments in the MySQL community and where Percona has been and where they are going.

Percona only took control of the event from O’Reilly three years ago, but the energy in the keynote and presentations and on the floor was evident as the attendance this year surged past 1000 participants. Furrier pointed out there has been an emergence of noSQL databases coming onto the scene but this event is proof positive MySQL is not going away.

Echoing Furrier, Zaitsev said, “PerconaLive is important because it is the big tent. We keep it open and we invite all kind of players here, our partners and our competitors, whether they share our opinions or not. Because we keep it real, that is very much appreciated by our attendees, our speakers and our sponsors.”

Watch the interview in its entirety here:

Early on, open source was embraced by Google, Amazon, Facebook and LinkedIn. They, with their armies of developers, are able to leverage an incredible amount of value out of open source. But, according to Furrier, smaller operations without the same capital considerations as the aforementioned behemoths find themselves having to submit to a glass ceiling. “How do you break the glass and take scale to the next level,” he asked.

“With MySQL, there are two kind of applications,” stated Zaitsev, “large and small.  The large are operations like Facebook and even slightly smaller scale.” He continued, “They need to scale to large amount of service implemented with technology like shard and cacheing. They use advanced stuff.” With the social media set, MySQL has already proven itself for its ability to take an application to an extreme scale. MySQL provides both efficiency and automation.

However, according to Zaitsev, even companies attempting small scale operations could experience significant results. “It could be simple setup but with recent hardware advances, you can run phenomenal amounts of traffic from those applications.”

For those with only a limited knowledgy of MySQL, the horizon has quite a lot of innovation being driven by increasing amounts of competition. Oracle, long thought of as the Apple of the software world for their proprietary development model, has seen an increase in their own innovation thanks to direct competition and cooperation in the open source community. “This,” according to Zaitsev, “benefits all MySQL users.”

Another exciting development is being brought about by competition between the big four: Google, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Their cooperative engineering effort is yielding WebScaleSQL. And while WebScaleSQL is specific to the needs of those particular companies, aiming for creating a variant to achieve extreme scale, the open source nature of it has allowed Oracle to review the patches and implement it in the mainline of MySQL. “Some innovation will, of course, remain in their respective branches of the cooperative outfits,” Zaitsev stated in response to a question from Kelly.

Percona, with a history of fewer than eight years, has focused on open source with a full throttled approach. “All of our products are open source and we have investment into development technology,” Zaitsev commented. “You will see a lot of features in MySQL Enterprise that will bring about integration. It really is important for us to push open source as much as we can.”