This time it is real...

A few months ago I updated my profile on LinkedIN, and adjusted my position as CTO and founder of Athoa Ltd, a British company currently active for translation services and events that in the past hosted a couple of interesting open source projects. I simply forgot to disable the email notification to my connections, set by default, and in 2-3 hours I received tens of messages from friends and ex-colleagues who were curious to hear about my new adventure.

Today, I changed my profile on LinkedIN again and have left the email notification set on purpose.

As of today, I join the team at ScaleDB. My role is to define the product and the strategy for the company, working closely with CEO Tom Arthur, CTO Moshe Shadmon, CMO Mike Hogan and the rest of the team.

Leaving CanonicalThe last nine months at Canonical have been an outstanding and crazily intense journey. I learned as I never learned before about systems and network infrastructures, and I met an amazing team of core engineers. It has been a unique experience, one of those that only come along once in a lifetime - I really mean it - and I will never forget it.

The decision to leave Canonical came after a lot of thinking and many sleepless nights. I met so many great people that in many ways, are making history in IT. In my team under Dan Poler, I worked with experienced Cloud and Solutions Architects that can analyze problems, discuss architectures and suggest solutions from the high level view, down to the kernel of the operating system and even to the silicon of systems and devices. Chris Kenyon and John Zannos teams are called “Sales”, but they are really advisors for a growing ecosystem of providers and adopters of Ubuntu and OpenStack technologies.

I have been inspired by the dedication and leadership of Canonical CEO Jane Silber. Jane has the difficult job of leading a company that is moving at lightspeed in many different directions, so that the technology that powers clouds, networks, end users and small devices can share the same kernel and will eventually converge. Jane is in my opinion the leading force, making Canonical blossom like a plum tree in mid-winter, when the rest of the of the nature still sleeps under the snow.

My greatest experience at Canonical has been working with Mark Shuttleworth. Mark is an inspiration not only for the people of Canonical or for the users of Ubuntu, but for us all. Mark’s energy and passion are second only to his great vision for the future. I recommend everybody to follow Mark’s blog and watch or attend his talks. His attention to detail and search for perfection never shadows the core message and understanding of the big picture; for this reason, both experienced listeners and newbies will have takeaways from his talks.

Back in June last year, I decided to join Canonical because of Mark’s vision. His ideas were in sync with what I wanted to bring at SkySQL/MariaDB. At Canonical, I could see this vision materialize in the direction the products were going, only on larger scale. This experience has reinforced in me the belief that we have an amazing opportunity right in front of us. The world is changing dramatically and at a speed that is incomparable with the past, even when compared with the first 10 years of the new millennium. We must think out of the box and reconsider the models that companies have used so far to sustain their business, since some of them are already anachronistic and create artificial barriers that will eventually collapse.

This experience at Canonical will stay with me forever and I hope to make a good use of what I have learned so far and all that I will learn in the future from Mark.

Joining ScaleDBThe last Percona Live was a great event. It was great to see so many friends and ex-colleagues again, now working on different companies but gathering together once a year as in a school reunion. Percona has now become a mature company, but more importantly, it has reached its maturity growing organically. The results are outstanding and the new course to be a global player in the world of databases looks even more promising.

The list of people and companies I would like to mention is simply too long and it would be a subject for a post per se. I found the MySQL world more active than ever. In this Percona Live I found the perfect balance between solid and mature technologies that are constantly improving, and new and disruptive technologies that are coming out under the same MySQL roof.

I simply feel as I am part of this world, and it is part of me. I worked with databases in many different roles for all my life, first with Digital/Oracle RDB and Digital/HP Datatrieve, then with IBM/Informix, Oracle, Sybase and SQLServer, and last with MySQL. I am looking at this world with the eyes of someone who has been enriched by new experiences. I simply think I have more to offer to this market than to networks and systems infrastructures. I therefore decided to come back. I also feel I can offer more in designing and defining products than in running services.

ScaleDB seems to me the company where I can express myself and I can help more at this point of my working life. With my previous role as advisor for the company, working on products and strategies just feels natural to me. The position is also compatible with my intention to improve and extend my involvement in the MySQL ecosystem, not only as MariaDB Ambassador, but also and equally advocating for Oracle and Percona products.

I also believe that MySQL should not be an isolated world from the rest of the database market. I already expressed my interest in Hadoop and other DB technologies in the past, and I believe that there should be more integration and sharing of information and experiences among these products.

I’ve known and have been working with Moshe Shadmon, ScaleDB CTO, for many years. Back in 2007, we spent time together discussing the use, advantages and disadvantages of distributed databases. At the time, we were talking about the differences between Oracle RAC, MySQL/NDB and DB/2, their strong and weak points, what needed to be improved. That was the time when ScaleDB as a technology started taking the shape that it has today.

ScaleDB is an amazing technology. It is currently usable as a storage engine with MariaDB 10.0, it has been developed with the idea of a cluster database from the ground up. As for MySQL in 2005, when the goal was to provide performance, scalability and ease of use in a single product, ScaleDB today provides more performance and greater scalability, without compromising availability and the use of standard SQL/MySQL. The engineering team at ScaleDB has recently worked on an amazing extension of their technology to sustain fast inserts and real-time queries on commodity hardware, at a fraction of the cost of NoSQL alternatives. This addition makes ScaleDB the perfect solution for storing and retrieving time series data, which is the essence for stream analytics and Internet of Things.

I believe ScaleDB has the incredible potential to become a significant player in the DB world, not only in MySQL. I feel excited and honored to be given the opportunity to work on this new adventure. I will try my hardest to serve the MySQL ecosystem in the best possible way, contributing to its success and improving the collaboration of companies - providers, customers, developers and end users - in MySQL and in the world of databases.

Now hop onto the new ride, the future is already here...