Peter Zaitsev

Founder Percona

Last Reviewed: September 29, 2026

Executive Summary

Peter Zaitsev is the founder of Percona, the open source database software, support and services company he started with Vadim Tkachenko in 2006. Before Percona he was an early employee of MySQL AB, where he led the High Performance Group, and he is a co-author of High Performance MySQL, one of the standard books on MySQL performance. He previously served as Percona’s CEO; the company is now led by CEO Peter Farkas, and Zaitsev is listed on its leadership team as Founder. Alongside Percona he co-founded the observability company Coroot in 2024 and sits on the boards of, or advises, several other open source startups.

Career Highlights

• Co-started Spylog, an early website statistics and tracking service, in 1999 while still at university; it was bought by MasterHost in 2007.
• Joined MySQL AB soon after its inception and went on to lead its High Performance Group, staying until 2006.
• Founded Percona with Vadim Tkachenko in 2006, initially providing support for MySQL; Percona now reports 350 teammates in 52 countries.
• Co-authored High Performance MySQL: Optimization, Backups, and Replication (O’Reilly), with Baron Schwartz and Vadim Tkachenko.
• Joined Coroot as co-founder in January 2024 and invested personally in the company.
• Started the Open Databases Alliance, a nonprofit, vendor-neutral association for the open source database ecosystem.

Professional Journey

Zaitsev was born and raised in Russia and studied at Lomonosov Moscow State University. While still a student, in 1999, he co-started his first company, Spylog, one of the early web tracking and site-statistics services; it was later acquired by MasterHost.

He joined MySQL AB, the company behind the MySQL database, early in its life and eventually led its High Performance Group. That work on database performance became the basis of what followed. In 2006 he left MySQL and, with Vadim Tkachenko, founded Percona to offer support for MySQL. Over the following years Percona built its own open source products around the database, including Percona Server for MySQL, the XtraDB storage engine, XtraBackup and Percona Toolkit, and later extended its support to MariaDB, MongoDB and PostgreSQL. The company was built without outside capital and grew, in Percona’s own description, from a two-person shop into one of the most respected open source companies in the business.

Zaitsev served as Percona’s CEO, and his own site now describes him as its ex-CEO. In October 2025 he publicly welcomed Peter Farkas, founder and former CEO of FerretDB and Percona’s first Director of Support, as the new CEO chosen by the board. Percona lists Zaitsev on its leadership team as Founder, and its press materials describe him as a board member and advisor to a range of open source startups.

He has continued to start and back companies. In January 2024 he joined Nikolay Sivko’s Coroot as co-founder, with a personal investment, to work on open source observability for modern applications; Coroot lists him as co-founder and advisor. His own bio also names Altinity, Ivinco and MigOps among the open source startups that followed Percona, and says he serves on their boards. He started the Open Databases Alliance, a nonprofit industry association, and is a frequent conference speaker on open source business and databases.

Away from work he runs trail ultramarathons and Spartan obstacle races, dives, skis and treks in the mountains; in 2023 he trekked to Everest Base Camp and climbed Toubkal in Morocco. He lives in North Carolina.

Education

Lomonosov Moscow State University

Undergraduate and master’s degrees (fields not stated in the sources read)