At Percona, we’re passionate about open source database software, helping organizations of all sizes run, manage, and optimize their databases with the freedom and transparency that open source provides. That spirit of openness doesn’t stop at our products, it runs through everything we do, including how we encourage our own people to innovate.
We recently ran a 6-week “Build with AI” competition here at Percona, where we invited all Perconians to use their AI technology/tool of choice to solve a problem, create something new, or improve a product or internal process that they felt was worth improving.
In the spirit of our belief that The Way Is Open, that open source should mean real freedom, not lock-in, inflated costs, or hollow promises, we encouraged as much transparency as possible sharing ideas with colleagues, and where appropriate with the community as well. “Default to building in open” was the guideline.
The rules were simple and minimal.
The Top 3 (as judged by our competition judges, Peter Farkas (CEO), Peter Zaitsev (Founder), Vadim Tkachenko (Co-Founder), and me (COO) would win prizes.
It’s easy to forget the breadth of talent and innovative ideas we have at Percona. I am fiercely proud to say that we’re surrounded by the best of the best every day, and I say it often to customers, partners, and colleagues. This competition was a great reminder! We had over 40 submissions from across the company, and from Perconians in 10+ teams. We saw representation from our Customer Success, Support, Engineering, Marketing, Product Management, Community, Legal and Contracts team, Professional and Managed Services teams, and more.
We ran into two stereotypical “great problems to have”:
First, we scheduled an entire day for the demos and presentations, and it wasn’t enough time. Fortunately, we found extra time pretty quickly.
Second – it was simply impossible to pick only 3 winners! There were just too many great ideas, so we had to get creative…
After a tough deliberation, here’s how our judges landed:
With no further ado, the first-place winner was Tibi Korocz (Observability Tech Lead). Tibi extended PMM to become an AI-assisted incident workspace, helping users not only understand their database environment better but also receive intelligent insights and real recommendations to improve, optimize, and fix issues. It’s also integrated with Percona Services, improving customer experience through integration with our ServiceNow platform. It’s a deserving winner and is worthy of its own blog post, which Tibi will publish (this article will be updated with the link)
Second was Dennis Kittrell (head of MySQL product & engineering). Dennis built a suite of open-source tools — including connectors for an internally hosted AI assistant that integrate Slack, Notion, Jira, and ServiceNow, and a local semantic search engine for Percona documentation — that together give Perconians smarter, faster access to the knowledge they need every day.
Third place was Agustin Gallego (Lead Database Performance Engineer), who built a Postgres extension that produces pt-query-digest-compatible slow query logs with extended PostgreSQL-specific metrics, inspired by Agustin’s vast MySQL experience and his belief that “thinking about Percona Server’s extended slow logging capabilities and pt-query-digest, I’ve always felt we could do better in Postgres.”
We also recognized the following:
Community Impact Award to Zsolt Parragi and Kai Wagner (Postgres Engineering team), for their hackorum.dev site. A new frontend for the pgsql hackers mailing list, something that has been missing in the community for a long time, and is already live. Check it out!
AI Transformation Award to Scott LaFortune and Kim Reddy (Marketing team), who built an internal platform for managing and creating materials (content, copy, campaigns, etc) that specifically encodes Percona’s brand voice and compliance rules so any Percona marketer gets on-brand output without needing to know how to prompt Claude, and kick-starts the AI transformation of our marketing team.
The Dare to Try award went to Molly Fulton in our contracts and legal team, who wanted to “pressure test the idea that “anyone can enter” and represent non-technical Perconians in this challenge”, and she did it by building a tool to help Perconians learn more about how our contracts team identifies and mitigates risk for our customers!
Congratulations to all of our winners! And also to all of our submissions – it was difficult to pick the winners, and we have decided that we are going to run this competition again later in the year. It was simply too good to be a one-time thing. A lot of the projects are going to continue and likely turn into full initiatives – I expect we will have more blog posts about them in the coming weeks and months.
Of course, I couldn’t finish this post without making a small request. If this is the sort of thing that excites you and you want to be at a company that encourages, embraces, and rewards this sort of innovation and experimentation, check out our careers page and join us!
