Make Alper Akgun a database maintainer

Background

• Gitlab employee for 14 months in growth team
• Database trainee maintainer for 10 months #5446 (closed)

Database Trainee

1. Over 70 database reviews

I had over 70 reviews mostly on gitlab app, and few on version & customers apps moving a lot of helpers and standards there.

1.a ~65% of reviews merged with no maintainer additions or nitpics/optional/backend comments

1.b None of the MRs created production issues or feedback

2. Batch counting and usage data query optimizations

I was indeed in the growth conversion team when I have become a database reviewer. I voluntarily jumped to the telemetry team to resolve usage ping, batch counting and index optimization issues because they were database related issues.

• Implemented the batch counters to overcome usage data count issues gitlab-org/gitlab!22705 (merged) - this allowed hundreds existing queries usage data to work fine and new ones to be authored
• Led the efforts, to optimized the query plans for usage data 30+ MRs with a lot of indexes
• Contributed to the solution for less conflict and conflict-free rails schema handling gitlab-org/gitlab!27885 (merged) gitlab-org/gitlab!30109 (merged)

3. Identifying Missing & Redundant Indexes

• Fix mis-used arguments for remove_concurrent_index_by_name gitlab-org/gitlab!36673 (merged)
• Fix index_exists? related uncreated indexes gitlab-org/gitlab#214466 (closed)

4. Database documentation & Office hours discussions

• Contributed several database documentation MR 1 and MR 2, MR3, MR4

5. Move gitlab app database helpers into other applications.

• Move migration helpers, and standards from gitlab app into versions and subscriptions portal apps https://gitlab.com/gitlab-services/version-gitlab-com/-/merge_requests/504

Becoming Trainee Maintainer

Improvement areas

• Focus on all queries and not danger-suggested files
• Use GitLab project ID/group ID to run queries
• On finders limit number of queries executed and avoid multiple queries

Strengths

• Good communicating db knowledge and best practices
• Referring to guidelines
• Thanks to multiple roles in frontend, backend, database, telemetry and growth conversion nique and comprehensive perspective about the problems the GitLab.com infrastructure and development faces
• Working on gitlab app as well as subscription portal, versions app, license app, iglu project helps to integrate database knowledge across those apps
• Working with the data team last year helped a broad knowledge of the database domain
• As a database reviewer, volunteer assignment to the telemetry team helped me gain a broad knowledge of the database models, and features across many stages and categories