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...
Jun
01
2015