Author Archives: Simona Aleksandrova
At Percona Live Amsterdam I caught up with Sveta Smirnova, a world-renowned MySQL expert, author of “MySQL Troubleshooting” and “MySQL Cookbook, 4th Edition”, and a frequent speaker at events from Oracle OpenWorld and FOSDEM to HighLoad. After decades as a support engineer, she now works as Principal Support Engineering Coordinator at Percona, where she owns the bug prioritization process, develops tools for Percona’s services teams, and maintains Percona Toolkit. We talked about how AI has changed support work, what makes a “small” bug a big one, and why she recommends motorbikes for the engineering mind.
The easy questions are gone
Ask Sveta what support has in common with 2005 and the answer is simple: people need help, and they come to support. …
August belonged to transparency: MariaDB published its governance framework, and the first contribution statistics report in over a year put numbers on who actually builds the server. Meanwhile the Q3 maintenance releases arrived for all four supported LTS series, the first round without 10.6, and two new sponsors joined along the way. Here’s what happened.
Lead story
MariaDB Server publishes its governance framework
Open source begins with access to the code, but infrastructure that is expected to last for decades needs more: clarity on how responsibility is assigned, how decisions are made, and what happens when people disagree or move on.
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Continue reading “MariaDB Foundation Newsletter – September 2026”