Continuing our series of getting to know the MongoDB Masters, we go further east and meet Aristarkh Zagorodnikov who is based In Moscow Russia.
Meet Aristarkh Zagorodnikov
Me: Who are you, what do you do and where are you based?
Aristarkh: My name is Aristarkh Zagorodnikov, I’m a tech and devops lead at DRIVE.NET, Inc. I’m based in Moscow, Russia, and doing programming (mostly C#, C++, ruby) and a bit of sysadmin duties (Linux and Windows) along with general tech guidance for our company for several years.
Me: How did you get involved in open source?
Aristarkh: I’m not sure if I’m really “involved” in open source, I just use things and try to get them working better, which often takes form of giving back changed code, suggestions or at least bug reports.
Me: How did you get involved in MongoDB?
Aristarkh: My involvement with MongoDB began about four years ago, when I was looking for an alternative to PostgreSQL (our longtime favorite) with better schema flexibility and more readily available failover setup. MongoDB happened to be the right thing for us and we’re mostly happy with the choice even to this day
Me: What do you do as a MongoDB Master?
Aristarkh: As a MongoDB Master I advise everyone to use it =) To be serious, I’m doing a little bit of MongoDB-favoring propaganda amongst people I meet, along with working on some internal projects that use MongoDB, some of which are going to be open-sourced, like https://bitbucket.org/onyxmaster/mod_gridfs was.
Me: How did you become a Master?
Aristarkh: I’m really not exactly sure how I became a MongoDB Master (since I don’t think I did something really interesting), but I believe that it is the result of me bombing the MongoDB JIRA with issues and asking questions about a range of things (mostly C# driver-related).
Me: What one thing would you like to promote in MongoDB that nobody knows about but you think is beneficial to people!
Aristarkh: I don’t actually think that MongoDB really needs promotion, but if you ask – for me, the most important thing about MongoDB is it’s not really a “NoSQL database”, it’s a general-purpose, adaptable data store with pretty good performance and robustness. This distinction is really important when you’re trying to do a lot of different things with your data at the same time. This point can be further proved with “competition” trying to emulate the idea by adding a key-value APIs and/or document-based storage formats (PostgreSQL 9.2’s HStore, MySQL memcached API, Oracle NoSQL DB and others).
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