Personal blog of Yzmir Ramirez

You might find this hard to believe, but AI has become kind of a thing around here.

Bennie published a post on our Build with AI competition last week, in which he shared that I was lucky enough to land the second place prize. Genuinely flattered, and a real thank you to Peter F, PZ, Vadim, and Bennie for organizing it. The recognition is great. But the part that does not quite come through in the recap is what those six weeks actually felt like from the inside. Forty-plus submissions, 10+ teams, marathon demo sessions that ran out of time twice over, and a constant drumbeat of ideas where every fifth one made me think “wait, we can just… ship that?”

Two submissions that really impressed me (and are worthy of high praise): Kedar Vaijanapurkar shipped a four-tool MySQL stack (Advisor, random data generator, CleanPrompt, and a Query Reviewer), any one of which on its own would have been a strong submission. And Daniil built a leaderboard for Percona ecosystem contributors plus a vector-search prototype running on Percona’s own products, which is exactly the dogfood story we want.

There were a lot more than three projects worth backing, which is part of why a second contest round is being coordinated later this year. A lot of the entries are not waiting for it either – they are already developing into real, operational utilities (some of mine included).

The two submissions of my own that I would point to first are IBEX and percona-dk.

IBEX (Integration Bridge for EXtended systems) is a local MCP multi-tool server that connects either a local model or a Percona-owned LLM to the systems where the most valuable context actually lives. Slack, Notion, Jira, ServiceNow, Salesforce, etc. A solution was needed here since we could not point the standard Claude or ChatGPT connectors at our sensitive internal data, and obviously most of the context that makes LLMs so valuable is precisely that kind of data.

percona-dk is the other one. It started as a way to keep AI honest about our own products by giving the AI tools our teams use (Claude, Cursor, anything that speaks MCP) direct access to Percona’s documentation, so the answer to a question about our products comes from real docs with linked citations instead of stale training data or even scraped web results that can get things wrong. It has evolved a fair bit since the contest. The Percona Community blog and forums are now indexed alongside the docs, Perconians are getting real day-to-day value out of it, and it is starting to look like the kind of thing that could grow into a community utility (perhaps even beyond Percona docs).

Those two were just the start. Once IBEX worked, I needed shared memory across LLMs, so I built that. Once I had three MCP servers running, the boilerplate got annoying, so I built CAIRN, a scaffolding tool that builds on Anthropic’s official MCP builder skill. The official skill walks you through writing a server step by step, but CAIRN spins up a complete, working project in minutes with a streamlined install wizard for non-technical users. It is now in the hands of other Perconians building their own MCP tools, and providing real value of its own. Then I learned about .mcpb files and Desktop Extensions (.dxt), packaged everything that way, and stood up an internal Claude plugin marketplace so any Perconian can install the lot from one place. Each layer opened a door I did not know existed until I was already through it. Some of those doors seemingly materialized from thin air as they magically aligned with new releases from Anthropic.

What started as a competition entry is now a small internal ecosystem. I am still a product person, not a software engineer. I am not going to pretend any of the code is pristine, and a lot of it was vibe-coded with Claude as a partner. But the architecture holds together, it works, and most of it is in daily use by people who are not me. That last part is the bit I am most proud of.

The next batch is pointed squarely at product operations. Making customer signals legible. Making internal telemetry something any teammate can talk to in plain English. The early returns are promising, and what gets me most excited is not the tech itself, it is watching people across Product, Engineering, and Support pull in the same direction with an AI colleague in the room. Turns out the interesting part of AI at work is not the model. It is the connective tissue.

I know Kung Fu

For a product guy who does not code for a living, this era is my “I know kung fu” moment. Not because I suddenly learned to fight. Because the move set I already had – product judgment, systems thinking, customer empathy, the ability to spec a thing precisely – just got a massive upgrade. The gap between “that would be useful” and “that exists now” is short enough to cross in an evening. I do not see it getting longer again.

Thanks for reading this far. If you want more detail or want to try anything not linked here, ping me. I am happy to share more.

The post I Know Kung Fu appeared first on Percona.

At Percona, we’re passionate about open source database software, helping organizations of all sizes run, manage, and optimize their databases with the freedom and transparency that open source provides. That spirit of openness doesn’t stop at our products, it runs through everything we do, including how we encourage our own people to innovate.

We recently ran a 6-week “Build with AI” competition here at Percona, where we invited all Perconians to use their AI technology/tool of choice to solve a problem, create something new, or improve a product or internal process that they felt was worth improving. 

In the spirit of our belief that The Way Is Open, that open source should mean real freedom, not lock-in, inflated costs, or hollow promises, we encouraged as much transparency as possible sharing ideas with colleagues, and where appropriate with the community as well. “Default to building in open” was the guideline.

 

The Rules

The rules were simple and minimal.

1. Do whatever you like. Whether that’s building new products or features that our customers and community will value, creating internal tools that help us work smarter and faster, improving our customer experience, or even tearing down processes and workflows that have outlived their usefulness.
2. Use whichever tool you want – our Percona-approved AI toolset, or other tools we haven’t bought en masse (yet). Expense your token spending if needed – we’ll cover the cost. 
3. Submit as many times as you like – multiple projects are welcome
4. Keep our compliance & governance policies in mind around customer/confidential data, we want to build responsibly.

 

The Top 3 (as judged by our competition judges, Peter Farkas (CEO), Peter Zaitsev (Founder), Vadim Tkachenko (Co-Founder), and me (COO) would win prizes. 

It’s easy to forget the breadth of talent and innovative ideas we have at Percona. I am fiercely proud to say that we’re surrounded by the best of the best every day, and I say it often to customers, partners, and colleagues. This competition was a great reminder! We had over 40 submissions from across the company, and from Perconians in 10+ teams. We saw representation from our Customer Success, Support, Engineering, Marketing, Product Management, Community, Legal and Contracts team, Professional and Managed Services teams, and more. 

We ran into two stereotypical “great problems to have”:

First,  we scheduled an entire day for the demos and presentations, and it wasn’t enough time. Fortunately, we found extra time pretty quickly. 

Second – it was simply impossible to pick only 3 winners! There were just too many great ideas, so we had to get creative…

 

The Winners

After a tough deliberation, here’s how our judges landed:

With no further ado, the first-place winner was Tibi Korocz (Observability Tech Lead). Tibi extended PMM to become an AI-assisted incident workspace, helping users not only understand their database environment better but also receive intelligent insights and real recommendations to improve, optimize, and fix issues. It’s also integrated with Percona Services, improving customer experience through integration with our ServiceNow platform. It’s a deserving winner and is worthy of its own blog post, which Tibi will publish (this article will be updated with the link)

Second was Dennis Kittrell (head of MySQL product & engineering). Dennis built a suite of open-source tools — including connectors for an internally hosted AI assistant that integrate Slack, Notion, Jira, and ServiceNow, and a local semantic search engine for Percona documentation — that together give Perconians smarter, faster access to the knowledge they need every day.

Third place was Agustin Gallego (Lead Database Performance Engineer), who built a Postgres extension that produces pt-query-digest-compatible slow query logs with extended PostgreSQL-specific metrics, inspired by Agustin’s vast MySQL experience and his belief that “thinking about Percona Server’s extended slow logging capabilities and pt-query-digest, I’ve always felt we could do better in Postgres.”

 

Special Recognition Awards

We also recognized the following:

Community Impact Award to Zsolt Parragi and Kai Wagner (Postgres Engineering team), for their hackorum.dev site. A new frontend for the pgsql hackers mailing list, something that has been missing in the community for a long time, and is already live. Check it out!

AI Transformation Award to Scott LaFortune and Kim Reddy (Marketing team), who built an internal platform for managing and creating materials (content, copy, campaigns, etc) that specifically encodes Percona’s brand voice and compliance rules so any Percona marketer gets on-brand output without needing to know how to prompt Claude, and kick-starts the AI transformation of our marketing team.

The Dare to Try award went to Molly Fulton in our contracts and legal team, who wanted to “pressure test the idea that “anyone can enter” and represent non-technical Perconians in this challenge”, and she did it by building a tool to help Perconians learn more about how our contracts team identifies and mitigates risk for our customers!

Congratulations to all of our winners! And also to all of our submissions – it was difficult to pick the winners, and we have decided that we are going to run this competition again later in the year. It was simply too good to be a one-time thing. A lot of the projects are going to continue and likely turn into full initiatives – I expect we will have more blog posts about them in the coming weeks and months.

Of course, I couldn’t finish this post without making a small request. If this is the sort of thing that excites you and you want to be at a company that encourages, embraces, and rewards this sort of innovation and experimentation, check out our careers page and join us! 

The post Innovation From Every Corner: Inside Percona’s Build with AI Competition appeared first on Percona.

Experience a full day of deep-dive technical sessions and meet database experts and a community of open source database users, developers, and technologists at Percona University events!Percona University is a series of free, Percona-hosted events focused on open source databases and related technologies. Since 2013, we have held these events in cities across the world […]

Percona.connect, a series of free events hosted by Percona database performance experts, is coming to a city near you!  This amazing learning opportunity spans six cities — across two continents — and includes educational sessions, customer testimonials, networking activities, and more. Don’t miss your chance to talk with technical evangelists, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MongoDB experts, Percona […]

Percona University Online has released a new free course, “MySQL 5.7 End of Life Options – Free Course at Percona University Online,” by Dave Stokes, Technical Evangelist at Percona. 

Dave is the author of MySQL & JSON – A Practical Programming Guide. He started to work with MySQL from the 3.29 version and was a part of the MySQL Community Team for over a decade.

MySQL 5.7 reaches its End of Life in October 2023. The Era of MySQL 5.x will be over, and only MySQL 8.0 will be officially supported. Learn how to keep your database secure and performant after that date and what real options you have if you decide to upgrade or stay on the current version. 

This course consists of eight short videos. Pass a brief quiz on Google Classroom afterward to receive a Certificate of Completion from Percona. The lesson list:

• Lesson 1: Introduction
• Lesson 2: What MySQL 5.7 EOL Really Means
• Lesson 3: What are the Real Upgrade Options?
• Lesson 4: Choosing Percona – Update to Enterprise Features at No Additional Cost
• Lesson 5: Upgrade Checker Part 1
• Lesson 6: Upgrade Checker Part 2
• Lesson 7: Upgrade Checker Part 3
• Lesson 8: Wrap Up

You can view the lessons directly on YouTube, but you’re eligible for the Certificate of Completion only when you complete the quiz on Google Classroom. You will need a Gmail account. If you join the class from Google Classroom directly, click “Join class” and enter the code of the class “xd36vr4”

For questions or suggestions, visit the Percona Forum Training category or contact us at community-team@percona.com.

 

Take the course

Percona University is a series of free educational events focused on Open Source and Open Source Database Technology, in particular, run by Percona. We run those events worldwide, both in recognized tech hubs and in locations that do not have a lot of tech events taking place, as Open Source shall not know limits and boundaries.

Due to the Pandemic, we had to put this project on pause, but now we’re back! In early June, we had Percona University in Lima, Peru, in partnership with ESAN University, and the community response was outstanding, with almost 200 people signed up!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Next in line are:

Percona University, Casablanca, Morocco, on June 27, 2023

Percona University, Belgrade, Serbia, on July 5, 2023 

Are you interested in bringing Percona University to your city? We rely a lot on local support to make those events successful. In particular, we need help with the venue (an auditorium that sits 50-200 people with AV setup) and local event promotion.

Interested? Fill out this form, and we will get back to you!

 

Bring Percona University to your city!

As I wrote in my invitation blog post, we got fortunate this year – Percona Live 2023 took place right after the Denver Marathon, which assembled us to put together a fantastic Database Runs event right before the conference.

Percona Staff, Conference Attendees, and local community members took part in this event, and we ran as four teams: MySQL, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, and MariaDB.

The Denver Marathon has more than 20,000 runners, and there were more than 1,000 Relay Teams (five members each) which makes for a fantastic run experience; there is always someone to chase, and there is always someone chasing you!

Weather also cooperated – while the day before and a couple of days after it was gloomy because of the forest, we had blue skies during our run.

Team PostgreSQL finished first, finishing #102, in the top 10% of all teams competing, which is a great result, considering so many of us were casual runners and also did not train at the “mile high” altitude of Denver. You can check other team results here by looking for the team number.

 

Percona Denver Relay Run May 2023

If you’re going to take on the second-highest peak in the lower 48 states, you might as well do it in great company. That’s precisely what we — Matthew Boehm, Michael Coburn, Péter Farkas, Jean-François Gagné, Marcin Gwóźdź, Kenny Gryp, Nando Laudares, and Alexander Rubin — decided to do. Fresh from attending Percona Live in Denver, we set off on a journey to conquer Mt Elbert, standing proud at 14,438′ (4400m).

We calculated that two nights at 10,000′ (3000m) would acclimatize us sufficiently for the thinner air on the mountain. We decided to take the Mt. Elbert Northeast Ridge Route as it offered the highest chance of a successful summit push, given the amount of snow still on the mountain.

Day 1: Acclimatization

After getting a good night’s sleep, we took breakfast at the Silver Llama, then on to picking up supplies. We headed to the local Safeway for bread, peanut butter, and jam. A few members who had rented equipment picked it up while the rest of us gathered at the hotel, prepping for our first experience on the Mt. Elbert Northeast Ridge trail. The trailhead started at 3075m, and we hiked to a max of 3584m, covering 9 km (5.6 miles) over four hours.

The locals seemed to be enjoying the weather and gladly accepted the food we offered.

The temperatures varied between 18°C to 31°C (64°F to 88°F), which made for a generally comfortable hike. Encountering substantial snow at the tree line, we tried on our snowshoes, breaking them in for the main hike.

As the day ended, we enjoyed the pizza from High Mountain Pies. Highly recommended!

Day 2: Summit Mt. Elbert

We gathered at 4:00 am in the hotel lobby and were on the trail by 4:45 am, our headlamps illuminating the path ahead. With the break of dawn around 5:30 am, we could finally switch off the headlamps and admire the trail in natural light.

As we ascended, we had some delightful encounters with local fauna:

We reached the summit in two separate teams, taking a group photo to capture this triumphant moment. Despite the chilly winds and the temperature being around 10°C (50°F), the clear skies provided perfect hiking conditions.

However, the descent proved to be a bit more challenging as ominous-looking clouds moved in, accompanied by sporadic thunder and lightning.

The rivers, despite the warmth in the afternoons, were peaceful and not overflowing their banks.

Friday’s journey had us walking 15 km (9.3 miles) for about nine hours, reaching the summit after five hours of climbing to 4400m (approx. 14,438 ft).

On behalf of the team, I would like to express my gratitude to Michelle Egan, Ella Boucaud, and the whole Percona Live team for ensuring we were organized throughout this adventure.

Also, we would like to share an exciting opportunity for adventurous souls. Peter Zaitsev is organizing a climb to the summit of Aconcagua, Argentina, in early 2024. To be part of this thrilling expedition, click here.

Percona Live will be held May 22nd through the 24th in Denver, Colorado. The first day, May 22nd, is devoted to tutorials. These tutorials are intense, high-quality sessions where you can learn new skills.  The list below is incomplete and may be re-arranged as schedules change.

The instructors are well-known professionals in the open source database communities, and this is your opportunity to learn from them.  The only downside?  Space is limited, and you must register as soon as possible for your choice of tutorials. 

• Getting Started with Group Replication – Matthew Boehm, Percona
• MySQL Architectures: Design the Right Solution for Your Needs – Frédéric Descamps, Oracle
• PostgreSQL Indexes demystified – Charly Batista, Percona
• Deploying MySQL on Kubernetes with the Percona Operator – Fernando Laudares Camargos, Percona
• Systematic performance analysis through PMM – Marcos Albe & Augustin Gallego, Percona
• Percona Xtrabackup: From Zero To Hero – Marcelo Altmann, Percona
• Unleashing PostgreSQL’s Power: Fine-Tuning for Maximum Performance in Read/Write/Read-Write Intensive Workloads – Ibrar Ahmed, Percona
• PMM Tutorial – Michael Coburn, Carlos Tutte, Ivan Groenewold, Francisco Bordenave, Percona
• Introduction to ClickHouse Tutorial – Alkin Tezuysal, Emrah Idman, ChistaDATA Inc
• The Gordian Knot, Successfully Upgrading PostGIS –  Robert Bernier, Percona

And please watch the Percona Live Website for additions to the list of tutorials and other updates.

 

Register for Percona Live

Sure, you ensure your database runs, but have you ever thought about running for your favorite database? You can do just that in Denver, Colorado, on Sunday, May 21, the day before Percona Live 2023 kicks off!

We’re partnering with the Denver Marathon to attract relay teams of five runners each who will complete legs of 3.9 to 6.5 miles (6 to 10 kilometers). We are recruiting runners for Team MySQL, Team MariaDB, Team PostgreSQL, and Team MongoDB.

Want to work with us to organize another team? Let us know!

In addition to putting it on the line for their beloved databases, Denver Marathon Relay participants get a T-shirt and special recognition during Percona Live 2023.

Denver Marathon Database Relay participation is free for Percona Live attendees. Space is limited, so apply as soon as possible by filling out this form.