Sensing what they felt was a lack of momentum around the event, Percona executives announced last August that a MySQL conference in 2012.

In some ways, the Percona Live event most closely resembles the old MySQL Conference, which has traditionally been held in Santa Clara in April.

Percona's two-day event will feature a keynote by Mårten Mickos, who was the CEO of MySQL. The schedule is heavy with technical presentations and user case studies, including one from Facebook. The core of the conference program runs for two days, one day less than past MySQL Conference events. But Percona expects the event to sell out, or at least come close to filling its 1,000-seat capacity.

Oracle's event, however, may offer the MySQL user community something that it may need more of: access to Oracle.

While Percona's conference has a lot of great material, it has scant input from Oracle itself, said Sheeri K. Cabral, who is on the MySQL Council for the Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG) and is presenting a talk at the Percona event. The Oracle conference could provide vital information such as technology road maps and offer a chance to talk with Oracle engineers working on MySQL, she said.