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Add Dylan Griffith as Database Maintainer

Dylan Griffith requested to merge add-dylangriffith-database-maintainer into master

Why is this change being made?

Trainee issue: #11160 (closed)

I would like to be considered for the Database Maintainer role. I've been a reviewer now since April 2021 and a trainee maintainer since May 2022 . I've also been a backend maintainer since January 2020.

In this time I've reviewed at least 40 merge requests in the database role and participated in database related code review for many more changes especially in the decomposition project. In practice it was likely a lot more but many DB reviews were trivial so I didn't bother adding them to the trainee issue.

I was involved in architecting and implementing CI decomposition so can provide expertise in this area of the database. I've also worked across many parts of the database stack and I'm quite experienced and familiar with the production database infrastructure as well, having made many changes to that.

In my time as a reviewer, I have learnt to look closely at database testing pipeline output, timing and warnings and keep an eye out on how they match up against our guidelines which often means re-reading our migration docs and asking for help from someone that might have changed the migration code recently. I also am usually quite thorough in confirming that the queries and query plans given actually match realistic queries that will be run in production by paying attention to the ids that are used and ensuring that the queries are final queries and not partial steps in an AR relation that won't be the final query we run in production.

Database reviews are tricky and require me to be extra thorough compared with backend reviews (in my opinion) because there are so many "gotchas" when operating at GitLab's scale and while I don't know as much as some about database query performance I am comfortable in finding the right people and asking questions when I'm unsure.

Some more things I am still trying to improve on:

  1. Query tuning: there is a lot to learn. Spending time reviewing resources like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ha38lcjVyhQ and examining the tooling we build in detail like InOperatorOptimization
  2. During past reviews I may not have necessarily deferred to experts enough before passing along to maintainer because I probably assume too often that the maintainer will catch anything I’ve missed. As I become a maintainer I will be continuing to focus on deferring to experts in areas where there are others with significant domain expertise especially in optimizing certain authorization queries or using new tooling under development to be extra sure I’m not missing important details

Author Checklist

  • Provided a concise title for this Merge Request (MR)
  • Added a description to this MR explaining the reasons for the proposed change, per say why, not just what
    • Copy/paste the Slack conversation to document it for later, or upload screenshots. Verify that no confidential data is added.
  • Assign reviewers for this MR to the correct Directly Responsible Individual/s (DRI)
    • If the DRI for the page/s being updated isn’t immediately clear, then assign it to one of the people listed in the Maintained by section on the page being edited
    • If your manager does not have merge rights, please ask someone to merge it AFTER it has been approved by your manager in #mr-buddies
  • If the changes affect team members, or warrant an announcement in another way, please consider posting an update in #whats-happening-at-gitlab linking to this MR
    • If this is a change that directly impacts the majority of global team members, it should be a candidate for #company-fyi. Please work with internal communications and check the handbook for examples.

Developer checklist

  • Before this MR is merged
    • Mention @gitlab-org/maintainers/database, if not done (this issue template should do this automatically)
    • Assign this issue to your manager
  • After this MR is merged

Manager checklist

Requesting feedback from @gitlab-org/maintainers/database 😄

Edited by Barry Firman

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