MySQL Rockstar 2013: Q&A with Sveta Smirnova.

Q1. You work at work Percona as Principal Support Engineer for MySQL, its forks and utilities.  What are your responsibilities?  

My title is Principal Support Engineering Coordinator and my responsibility is to ensure that Support team has tools, necessary to perform their job effectively. So my role includes project or even product management, engineering, meetings with Engineering team and ensuring they develop features, necessary for Support team, leading Bugs Escalation committee, and many more.

  
Q2.You joined Percona in 2015. What are your most important projects you completed at Percona? 

Right after I joined Percona I wrote a blog post series “Explain format=JSON is cool!“

The purpose of these series was advertising that recently released explain format JSON is much more powerful tool than regular explain. I believe I was succeeded, because this format became default format for Percona Support data collection.

Another big project was MySQL Troubleshooting webinar series where I educated how to troubleshoot MySQL from very basic . Unfortunately, Percona Marketing recently removed all webinar recordings older than last two years, so you can find only follow-up posts in the Percona blog.

Currently I am working on two big projects.

One is PMM Dump: the tool that allows our users to dump diagnostics data from PMM and send it to us for further investigation. You will find user manual for this tool here.

Another is Percona Toolkit. I took over its development after the toolkit was in low maintenance state for more than 5 years. Since I started I pay special attention for Community contributions and try to include them into the Toolkit as fast as possible. Today I am finalizing release 3.7.0 with MySQL 8.4 support. You will find more information about Percona Toolkit here.

Q3. You are also the author of the book “MySQL Troubleshooting” and JSON UDF functions for MySQL. What is the main message of this book? 

Idea of the book was to provide readers easy and clear path to troubleshooting their MySQL applications. That time I worked in MySQL Bugs Verification group and often saw reports where users blamed MySQL for correct but not very intuitive behavior. Sometimes I had to close reports where users showed very similar misunderstandings everyday. I wanted to give them knowledge that will help them to resolve such issues without external help. For that time, I succeed: after my book was published I noticed decrease in number of invalid reports for specific typical issues.

Another big thing was helping the readers to figure out which logs to collect and which actions to perform in case of trouble. That time, there were not other books, focused solely on MySQL troubleshooting and new MySQL users could feel alone when started seeing troubles.

  
Q4. In your bio you mentioned that your “main professional interests are problem solving, working with tricky issues, bugs, finding patterns that can solve typical issues quicker and teaching others how to deal with MySQL issues, bugs and gotchas effectively. ” 

What are the main lessons you have learned in the last years? 

The main lesson is to do not try to judge the solution that a customer uses only by your best practices knowledge. I sometimes see very weird queries or scenarios. I always ask my users why they decided to implement such complicated solution and they always have very valid business reasons for this.

  
Q5. What were the most important challenges you had to face?  

I have too many plates in my hands: PMM Dump, Percona Toolkit, not-[yet]-public Percona projects, Bugs escalation, bringing concerns of Support team to the Engineering and vice versa, writing, blogging, talking at conferences and webinars, doing regular Support tickets, analyzing Support tickets by others to figure out problematic patterns that need to be resolved, working on bugs. The most important challenge is to use my time wisely.

  
Q6. You won the Oracle MySQL Rockstars 2023. Congratulations. What were the contributions you made that convince the jury to give you such an award? 

I believe this is because my second book: “MySQL Cookbook, 4th edition”, written with co-author Alkin Tezuysal. First three editions were written by Paul DuBois: very talented author of many MySQL books and MySQL user reference manual. The main challenge was to make the book up-to-date for year 2022 while not making it worse than previous editions. I am proud of “Using MySQL Shell”, “MySQL Replication”, and “Working with JSON” chapters, as well as for some new examples I added.

  
Q7. What are your future projects related to MySQL?  

Currently, I am discussing content of new introductory MySQL book that will cover best MySQL practices as of year 2026. Year in the planned title is important: MySQL has 30 years of history and many features. Some of features, that were popular 30 or 10 years ago, were replaced by better solutions by now. However, I am, as MySQL support engineer and a maintainer of a MySQL chat room, often feel sorry when new MySQLers start with using silently deprecated features, practices designed for legacy MySQL versions, or references, not updated for years. So I want to write introductory book free of such advises. Unfortunately, existing even in my own book “MySQL Cookbook, 4th edition”, because that book were written for users of all existing versions of MySQL, including now legacy 5.6 and 5.7.

I am also planning webinar series that will support the future book.

  
Qx. Anything else you wish to add?

I wish MySQL will continue to be highly ranked database, perfectly fit for many kinds of business.

Resources

MySQL Cookbook, 4th Edition by Sveta Smirnova, Alkin Tezuysal Released August 2022 Publisher(s): O’Reilly Media, Inc. ISBN: 9781492093169

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Sveta Smirnova, Principal Support Engineering Coordinator, Percona.

Sveta Smirnova works in MySQL Support teams since 2006. Her main professional interests are problem-solving, working with tricky issues and bugs, finding patterns that can solve typical issues quicker, and teaching others how to deal with MySQL issues, bugs, and gotchas effectively. She is the author of the books “MySQL Troubleshooting,” “MySQL Cookbook 4th Edition”, and JSON UDF functions for MySQL. Sveta has spoken at many events, including Fosdem, Percona Live, and Oracle Open World.

Sponsord by MySQL/Oracle.