Hi, I am a consultant, advisor, entrepreneur and a long-time computer performance nerd. I’m interested in the inner workings of complex systems and especially how all the pieces work together. That helps me build and fix mission-critical enterprise data systems with less of trial’n’error and more of a systematic approach.
30 years ago, I started as a part-time C developer and then moved to Unix, Linux, Oracle Exadata, Exascale and other platforms, like Spark, Hadoop & distributed cloud SQL ecosystems. My work has ranged from fixing problems in unfamiliar embedded systems (down to binary disassembly) and troubleshooting low-level (RDMA) network issues - to removing performance bottlenecks in 1000-node clusters and designing sharding & data pipeline strategies for globally distributed financial databases. I can handle unknowns and navigate the entire stack.
I occasionally consult for tech firms and F500 companies and have both built & advised startups too. Over the years I have directly helped enterprise customers in about 25 countries on 6 continents.
I do my coding mostly in Python and C, I publish some of my work as open source and am currently working on speeding up my CatBench Vector Search benchmark project with PyTorch & CUDA. In addition to my technical research & development work, I talk (and learn) at industry conferences:
Since 2003 I have given talks and workshops at conferences, public & private events all around the world
Oracle AI World, Strata Data Conference, CMG International Conference, Cloud World, UKOUG Tech, IOUG Collaborate, RMOUG, NoCOUG, NYOUG, HotSos Symposium, Trivadis Performance Days, DB Tech Showcase Japan, Netapp University Day, Amazon Commit and many others
As my introduction says, I have been a computer performance geek and entrepreneur for a long time. Most of this time I have been an independent consultant or have ran a company I had founded or co-founded.
2008: Co-founded a startup called E2SN. We built a product to help large enterprises with their data center consolidation and virtualization planning. We invented novel technologies like automatic database workload characterization and Bookshelf Graphs for data visualization.
2010: Co-founded a startup around the Voicee app that enabled asynchronous voice communication and collaboration. By now, big players like Apple and WhatsApp have added such functionality directly into their products.
2011: Founded a consulting company Enkitec Europe and teamed up with Enkitec in US to be part of the world’s most successful Oracle Exadata team. I built Enkitec Group’s business in EMEA region.
2014: Enkitec group got acquired by Accenture and I became a director of R&D in Accenture Enkitec Group.
2015: Co-founded and was the first investor in Gluent (acquired by Google), a data virtualization company breaking down data silos with the help of modern cloud technologies. During my tenure as the founding CEO and product lead, we successfully went through the stages of the idea » funding » team » product » first enterprise customers from mid-size to Fortune 500.
2024: Having fun and working on my open source 0x.tools project that will radically change how people approach complex system performance issues and drill-down observability :-)
