About askdba

Professional Background

Alkin Tezuysal is an open-source database evangelist with over 30 years of experience in relational databases. He currently serves as Chief Strategy Officer at ProxySQL, where he focuses on proxy architecture, scalability, and the broader MySQL and PostgreSQL ecosystem.

In parallel, he leads the development of MyVector, an open-source plugin that brings native vector search to MySQL Community Edition. MyVector enables semantic search and AI-ready database applications entirely within the MySQL stack, without requiring an external vector database service. He also maintains MySQL MCP Server, a read-only Model Context Protocol server that lets AI assistants like Claude query MySQL and MariaDB safely.

Experience

Throughout his career, Alkin has led global database operations teams for MySQL and ClickHouse environments, contributed to the Vitess project as a maintainer, and helped organizations across industries design and scale their database infrastructure. His work spans database architecture, performance engineering, replication topology, and the operational discipline of running open-source databases at scale.

He has extensive experience bridging enterprise database operations with open-source community development, contributing code, writing documentation, organizing events, and mentoring engineers entering the field.

Recognition

Alkin’s contributions to the database community have been recognized by Oracle, Redgate, and the broader open-source community:

Oracle ACE Pro badge

Books

Alkin has authored two technical books on database operations and design:

  • MySQL Cookbook, 4th Edition (O’Reilly Media, 2022), co-authored with Paul DuBois. A comprehensive recipe collection covering MySQL operations, queries, stored procedures, JSON, full-text search, replication, and performance tuning, fully updated for MySQL 8.x.
  • Database Design and Modeling with PostgreSQL and MySQL (Packt Publishing, 2024). A practical reference on data modeling, schema design, normalization, indexing strategy, and cross-database architecture for teams working across PostgreSQL and MySQL.

Both titles are available on the Books page.

Speaking

Alkin is a well-known speaker at worldwide open-source database conferences, including Percona Live, FOSSASIA Summit, MySQL BR Conf, All Things Open, and preFOSDEM MySQL Belgian Days. His talks cover vector search, ProxySQL architecture, MySQL internals, cloud-native database operations, and the evolution of the open-source database ecosystem.

Past conference recordings are available on the Recordings page. Upcoming appearances are listed on the Events page.

Connect

The preferred way to reach Alkin is via LinkedIn. He also shares updates on X (@ask_dba) and publishes open-source work on GitHub. For direct inquiries, use the contact form.