Welcome to the second installment of a new blog series introducing some of the experts you might encounter when you work with ScyllaDB. (In the first, we met Tyler Denton, Solutions Architect).
Today we’re featuring Faisal Saeed, Principal Customer Engineer on the Customer Experience team here at ScyllaDB. He lives in Singapore and has been at ScyllaDB for more than 2 years.
Let’s learn a little about Faisal…
What do you do here at ScyllaDB
I have a hybrid role where I work with existing customers as their Principal Customer Engineer, helping them ensure their ScyllaDB Cloud / on-prem clusters are in good health and performing according to their expectations. Secondly, I work as a pre-sales Solutions Architect for clients who are not existing ScyllaDB customers and are evaluating ScyllaDB. Here, I often help with data modeling or planning their data migration from their existing database into ScyllaDB Enterprise / ScyllaDB Cloud clusters.
Please share a little about your path to ScyllaDB
I have worked in the IT industry for about 30 years and have extensive database experience. Before joining ScyllaDB, I was a Principal Solutions Architect with MariaDB for 6 years. Before that, I worked with ACI Worldwide as a database architect on projects for DBS Bank in Singapore. Before that, I spent many years at NCS, working as a database architect on DBS Bank projects.
Tell me about one of the most interesting projects you’ve worked on here
While I work with many amazing customers, the project I cherish the most is an in-house developed tool that automates ScyllaDB Enterprise/Cloud/X Cloud clusters with a single command, allowing the user to run various workloads and perform stress testing of multiple clusters. This is the ScyllaDB Automation Framework, and I have worked on this project for more than a year. This helps various team members in ScyllaDB with their day to day tasks, whether running a demo for a customer or simulating a customer use case.
What’s the most impressive ScyllaDB feat you’ve seen a team accomplish
If we talk about teams in ScyllaDB, X Cloud is an amazing ScyllaDB product that lets customers save costs while running at any scale. The team has done an outstanding job. Talking about customers, every one of them is unique in some way. JioStar from India uses ScyllaDB to support IPL, World Cup Cricket, and many other supporting events where millions of users concurrently log in to ScyllaDB clusters through their app — and ScyllaDB handles them gracefully without any lags. There are many others, but I can’t mention everyone.
What do you like to do when you’re not working or on-call
I spend time with my wife at home, go out for long walks, watch movies, and care for two bunnies who have been with us for more than 5 years.
What’s your top tip for getting the most out of ScyllaDB
I can’t recommend just one thing, but ScyllaDB is designed to run almost on autopilot. Rarely is there a need to tune any aspect of the ScyllaDB cluster. But if I had to pick one thing, it would be “proper NoSQL data modeling.” I have seen many teams struggle with performance because they had a poor data model. After spending some time with them and helping them fix their data model mistakes, their ScyllaDB cluster ran smoothly with the promised single-digit P99 latencies. I recommend everyone to join ScyllaDB University (it’s free) and take the beginner and advanced data modeling courses.
