Korotkov Alexander Evgenievich

Korotkov Alexander Evgenievich

Aleksandr Korotkov is the co-founder and development manager of Postgres Professional.

Biography

Education and Science

In 2008 he graduated MEPHI with honors. He defended his thesis based on his contribution to the development of an open, namely, DBMS PostgreSQL on improvements in spatial search and fuzzy search for strings, including index search by regular expressions. Before foundation Postgres Professional , he taught at MEPhI, was engaged in the development of high-load web projects, support for PostgreSQL.

PostgreSQL from the very beginning I liked its severity, adherence to standards, expandability and flexible indexing capabilities, - said Alexander Korotkov.

Development experience

Aleksandr Korotkov is one of the leading Russian developers of PostgreSQL in the international status of major contributor. One of his biggest achievements was the development of an infrastructure for the extensibility of index access methods. Alexander Korotkov's contribution to open source also includes improvements for GiST and GIN indices, optimization for multi-core architectures, statistics, and selectivity estimation. Alexander has been a mentor on Google's Summer of Code four times.

Opensors with a good community, even if it's an enthusiastic job, is worth investing your time. There is no such broadening of the horizons anywhere else, neither at the institute nor at special courses. This is acquired with great experience, but in opensorse it can be done much faster, - noted Korotkov.

Areas of expertise

• Optimization of DBMS performance for multi-core architectures
• Index Access Methods
• Algorithms for spatial search and fuzzy string search
• Semi-structured data
• Full-Text Search

Inclusion in the list of PostgreSQL DBMS committers

In June 2018, the list of committers (developers who have the right to make changes to the project core DBMS PostgreSQL) was replenished by the second Russian. The list of the main committers of the PostgreSQL kernel included Alexander Korotkov, co-founder and head of development of the Russian company. Postgres Professional TAdviser was informed about this by the company.

Before him, only one Russian was present in the list of committers - Fedor Sigaev, who works at Postgres Professional with Korotkov. Both of them are also present in the list of main contributors to the project, which also includes another Postgres Professional employee - Oleg Bartunov. Unlike developers with the status of a committee, the creditor cannot make edits unreasonably to the database engine.

Alexander Korotkov was included in the list along with six more new committers from the United States, Japan, India and the Czech Republic. Before their addition, there were 22 committers in the project, of which about 12 were actively updating patches. In turn, the list of contributors as of the beginning of June 2018 totals more than 60 people from different countries.

The main conditions for obtaining the status of committers are a significant contribution to the development of the PostgreSQL database engine for a long time, work on different kernel subsystems, revues of other people's patches, and not just writing their own. High code quality is also a requirement, requiring minimal edits by other committers.

Postgres Professional told TAdviser that Alexander Korotkov's main contribution to the development of the PostgreSQL kernel includes plug-in index access methods, improvements in GiST and GIN indices, improved spatial search algorithms and fuzzy string search, optimization for multi-core systems.

The title of Committer gives the person the right to make changes to the project core, added to Postgres Professional. Committer accepts or does not accept patches (new functions in DBMS) sent by other developers from around the world.

Postgres Professional told TAdviser that for PostgreSQL 12, Alexander plans to continue working on the following improvements:

• API for plug-in table engines (collaborative development with other community members),
• Support for 64-bit transaction IDs,
• Support for incremental sorting,
• Further optimizations for multi-core machines.

Leaving "Postgress Pro"

12.5% share of Postgress Pro co-founder Alexander Korotkov in October 2020 was distributed among the other co-owners of the company. Korotkov himself left Postgress Pro.