Cabral of the idea of one company controlling the conference for what is, after all, a community-driven technology. Ultimately, it would be best if Oracle's event and Percona's were combined in the years to come, Cabral suggested. Many organizations will only pay to send their administrators to one conference a year, so having two conferences might dilute attendance and wear thin the speakers. Setting up such a unified event may prove to be logistically and politically tricky, she admitted, given that Oracle and Percona offer competing MySQL products and services.

Percona executives continue to see the value in their own conference, however.

"It's nice to see that Oracle is once again showing interest in the MySQL community after dropping their support for the annual April MySQL user conference two years ago," said Baron Schwartz, Percona chief performance architect. The Oracle event may have some drawbacks, he said. For instance, it is unclear how much input non-Oracle vendors and developers will have at the event, through outside talks and presentations. Also, the Oracle conference is being held on the weekend, not a typical practice for business conferences.

This is not the first time Oracle has experienced a bifurcation of energies around its open-source software. After Oracle took over, the communities around Sun's Hudson and OpenOffice started their own efforts (called Jenkins and LibreOffice, respectively).

Registration for Oracle's conference will begin April 16, when the company also starts to accept paper submissions.