New MariaDB Foundation staff member sponsored by Alibaba: Lixun Peng

The MariaDB Foundation is happy to announce that today a new staff member, Lixun Peng, has started working as a Senior Developer of MariaDB. Lixun’s work is sponsored by Alibaba, and he also holds the title of Staff Database Engineer at Alibaba Cloud.

Alibaba is a China-based e-commerce company founded in 1999. It has grown to be one of the largest e-commerce companies in the world with a market value of over 200 billion euros. There are more than one hundred thousand mysqld instances in Alibaba Cloud RDS (Alibaba’s database cloud service). Through its history, Alibaba has used MySQL/MariaDB and has now also sponsored the MariaDB Foundation.

Alibaba wants to secure the continuity of the MariaDB database server, which is both published and developed as an open source project in the true spirit of public collaboration.

Lixun is specialized in replication and he will focus on enhancing the replication features in the MariaDB database server and merge the AliSQL (Alibaba’s open source MySQL branch) patches into MariaDB. As a native Chinese speaker he will also work on making more MariaDB content available in Chinese, help drive MariaDB adoption in China and strengthen the technical community around it.