My database communities

I have been working on databases since 1996. In some cases I just worked on the product (Oracle & Informix), in others I consider myself a member of the community (MySQL, Postgres & RocksDB). And for MongoDB I used to be in the community.

I worked on Informix XPS in 1996. I chose Informix because I could live in Portland OR and walk to work. I was fresh out of school, didn't know much about DBMS, but got a great starter project (star query optimization). The company wasn't in great shape so I left by 1997 for Oracle. I never used Informix in production and didn't consider myself as part of the Informix community.

I was at Oracle from 1997 to 2005. The first 3 years were in Portland implementing JMS for the app server team and the last 5 years at Oracle HQ working on query execution.  I fixed many bugs, added support for ieee754 types, rewrote sort and maintained the sort and bitmap index row sources. The people there were great and I learned a lot but I did not enjoy the code base and left for a startup. I never used Oracle in production and don't consider myself as part of the Oracle community.

I lead the MySQL engineering teams at Google for 4 years and at Facebook/Meta for 10 years. I was very much immersed in production and have been active in the community since 2006. The MySQL teams got much done at both Google (GTID, semi-sync, crash-safe replication, rewrote the InnoDB rw lock) and Facebook/Meta (MyRocks and too many other things to mention). Over the years at FB/Meta my job duties got in the way of programming so I used performance testing as a way to remain current. I also filed many bugs might still be in the top-10 for bug reports. While Oracle has been a great steward for the MySQL project I have been critical about the performance regressions from older MySQL to newer MySQL. I hope that eventually stops because it will become a big problem.

I contributed some code to RocksDB, mostly for monitoring. I spent much more time doing performance QA for it, and filing a few bugs. I am definitely in the community.

I don't use Postgres in production but have spent much time doing performance QA for it over the past ~10 years. A small part of that was done while at Meta, I had a business case, and was able to use some of their HW and my time. But most of this has been a volunteer effort -- more than 100 hours of my time and 10,000+ hours of server time. Some of those server hours are in public clouds (Google, Hetzner) so I am also spending a bit on this. I found a few performance bugs. I have not found large performance regressions over time which is impressive. I have met many of the contributors working on the bits I care about, and that has been a nice benefit.

I used to be a member of the MongoDB community. Like Postgres, I never supported it in production but I spent much time doing performance QA with it. I wrote mostly positive blog posts, filed more than a few bugs and even won the William Zola Community Award. But I am busy enough with MySQL, Postgres and RocksDB so I haven't tried to use it for years. Regardless, I continue to be impressed by how fast they pay down tech debt, with one exception (no cost-based optimizer).