MySQL Community Steering Committee
The inaugural Steering Committee brings together experienced leaders from across the MySQL ecosystem to provide strategic guidance, strengthen collaboration between contributors, and help foster an open, transparent, and sustainable community. The committee represents an important milestone in the evolution of the MySQL contributor program, bringing together leaders from across the ecosystem to help strengthen collaboration between Oracle and the broader community as participation continues to grow.
The Steering Committee provides long-term technical and community governance for the MySQL ecosystem, helping to ensure balanced representation, sustainable project direction, and healthy collaboration across the broader MySQL community.
Steering Committee Members
Pravin Mittal – AWS
Pravin Mittal serves as Director of Engineering at Amazon Web Services (AWS), where he owns and leads all engineering efforts for Aurora and RDS open source databases. Mittal helped to launch Amazon DocumentDBand Amazon Timestream, demonstrating his expertise in building innovative database services at scale. Prior to AWS, he worked at Microsoft on SQL Server and HDInsight, bringing deep expertise in both traditional and big data database technologies. He holds an MS in Computer Science and Engineering and an MBA from the University of Washington. With his comprehensive ownership of AWS's open source database portfolio and proven track record of launching successful database services, Mittal brings valuable technical and strategic perspective to the MySQL Steering Committee, representing AWS's significant commitment to the MySQL open source ecosystem.
Jenő Szabó – Booking.com
Jenő Szabó leads site reliability and platform engineering teams at Booking.com, ensuring that application developers can easily utilize relational databases. Despite over 24 years of background in the gaming and automotive navigation industries, nothing quite prepared him for the past seven years dedicated to running MySQL on steroids in a reliable and compliant manner, all to help travelers experience the world more easily.
Alex Joseph – Google
Alex Joseph has spent 22 years working exclusively in MySQL, spanning its evolution from on-premise deployments to cloud-native services. He built MySQL expertise from the ground up at Yahoo!, ran it at gaming scale on early Cloud at Zynga, and worked on replication correctness at Facebook. At LinkedIn he launched MySQL-as-a-Service, eliminating provisioning time, plus multi-primary support with zero-downtime failovers. Since 2019 he has led Google Cloud SQL's MySQL engineering, delivering the industry's first Cloud-Scale Vector Search for MySQL. He brings both practitioner depth and engineering perspective to the challenges of database platform direction and long-term technical strategy.
Jenni Garvie – JP Morgan Chase
Executive Director at JPMorganChase with 25 years of experience across a wide range of technical disciplines and industries. Leads engineering and operations for a large-scale, managed, opinionated MySQL platform powering 2,000+ instances across the firm. Focused on building reliable, secure, and scalable database services that enable teams to deliver faster with confidence.
Gopal Shankar – MySQL Engineering
Gopal Shankar is the Director of MySQL Engineering, leading the organization responsible for the strategy, development, and roadmap of one of the world's most popular database platforms. With more than 20 years of experience at the heart of database engine architecture, his expertise lies in MySQL core internals, including kernel-level development, performance tuning, and scalability. His current focus is on executing the MySQL roadmap and ensuring the platform remains a powerful, reliable foundation for modern applications. Beyond strategy, he stays closely connected to kernel-level complexities, addressing challenges such as high CPU usage, database corruption, and throughput bottlenecks. He is committed to fostering technical excellence and delivering a database engine that continues to evolve with the industry's needs.
Seema Sundara – MySQL Engineering
Seema is currently Senior Director of Development for MySQL. She has over 25 years of experience designing and building databases and distributed systems. Prior to her current role, she was a technical architect with the MySQL HeatWave team and the Oracle database server team. Her expertise and interests lie in several aspects of core database development including but not limited to query optimization, indexing, semantic and graph technologies, performance, and autonomous databases. She has several patents and publications in the areas of extensible architecture, indexing, query processing and AI driven databases. Her current focus is on ensuring that MySQL remains the most popular database platform by focusing on features that cater to the needs of modern database applications, and to increase community involvement and adoption.
As the Steering Committee begins its work, the MySQL community will continue advancing the MySQL Community roadmap. Please see the Governance Document for additional details on the governance model and contributing to MySQL.