Interview with Sergei Golubchik

Sergei Golubchik is one of the "old hands", one of the first ten with the company.

Tell us about your role within MySQL AB?

Sergei: As Senior Software Developer, I'm responsible for code reviews, replies to bug reports, security reports, and the FULLTEXT search implementation. And I am currently working on MySQL's XA [distributed transactions] implementation. For the code reviews, I work together with all server developers, and for the bug reports this also includes the support people.

That's a lot and quite diverse - which of your work are you most proud of?

FULLTEXT search.

And your biggest challenge?

That has been and is - review faster, reply to emails sooner, don't make people wait for me.

Probably everybody's challenge! Please tell us some more about your background?

I am 30 years old now. I have a PhD in Physics. I was born in the Ukraine, but I now live in Osnabruck, Germany.

Where is your office - do you work at home too like so many at MySQL AB?

My office is indeed at home: a table in the living room, with a computer.

And how do you like working this way?

I like it. The advantages are the freedom to manage the time the way I want it, the freedom to live where I please, etc. The disadvantage is having limited personal contacts during work, and the main challenge -as compared to regular office environment- is more independent working, you have to solve your problems on your own (but it is the way I like it).

What do you do outside working hours?

I don't have much time for hobbies, but I like to travel... [MySQL AB has -by necessity- staff and departmental meetings all over the place] I always try to take my family with me.

You've been with the company since March 2000, tell us how you joined?

I worked in a project where we had to deal with lots of textual information (tables of contents of scientific magazines).. I used "glimpse" for indexing, but I knew that what we really needed was a fulltext search engine, one that could work with structured data (an element in the table of contents is not only a pure text - it's also, number of pages, date, list of authors, title of the magazine, ISBN, etc, and you'd like to search on all of them). We needed the kind of search a relational DBMS can do - but with fulltext search capabilities added in as well.

I tried to find a solution... nothing was available, so I though about writing it myself. Being a lazy guy I wanted to write fulltext search only, without bothering with i/o, memory management, client-server protocol, etc, so it was natural to look at extending an existing open source DBMS. MySQL was known to be the fastest and open source. I wrote to Monty, asking "I'm gonna write fulltext search for MySQL - what should I look at?" By the way, at that time the MySQL version was MySQL 3.22.7.

In October 1998, the first version of fulltext search for ISAM was ready. Half a year later, when I got the first 3.23.0, it was rewritten for MyISAM. In October 1999 it was released in 3.23.5 - still "useless", without a SQL interface. Then I started coding the SQL part, in March 2000 Monty offered me a position (in the not yet existing MySQL AB), and in June 2000 the first version featuring MATCH ... AGAINST syntax was released.

Wow, now there's a story! Why specifically did you want to work for MySQL AB?

Monty offered me a job to do what I knew I would be doing anyway -coding fulltext search- it was an offer one could hardly refuse! :)

Fair enough! Who else among our developers would you like to see interviewed?

The authors of major features: subqueries/views/query cache, Unicode, GIS, stored procedures, triggers. Also the people working on the connectors, GUI clients, etc, but server features come first to my mind.

That's quite a list, but I'm on the case. Thank you very much for your time!

Thank you.