Vadim Tkachenko

Co-Founder and Technology Fellow Percona

Last Reviewed: September 29, 2026

Executive Summary

Vadim Tkachenko is co-founder and Technology Fellow of Percona, the remote-only open source database company he started with Peter Zaitsev in 2006, initially to support MySQL. He is an engineer rather than a business executive: a former performance engineer at MySQL AB whose code patches were taken into mainstream MySQL and InnoDB, and a co-author of the standard reference High Performance MySQL. Percona has since grown to about 350 people with its own distributions of MySQL, PostgreSQL and MongoDB, and is run day to day by chief executive Peter Farkas. In May 2026 Tkachenko also became President of the OurSQL Foundation, a new vendor-neutral non-profit for the MySQL community.

Career Highlights

• Co-founded Percona with Peter Zaitsev in 2006, starting with MySQL support.
• Previously Percona’s Chief Technology Officer, leading Percona CTO Labs; now listed as Co-Founder and Technology Fellow.
• Under his supervision Percona developed Percona Server for MySQL, Percona XtraBackup, Percona XtraDB Cluster and Percona Server for MongoDB, according to his company biography.
• Performance Engineer at MySQL AB and member of the High-Performance Group in the official MySQL support team.
• Co-author of High Performance MySQL: Optimization, Backups, and Replication, 3rd edition.
• President of the founding board of the OurSQL Foundation, launched 27 May 2026.

Professional Journey

Tkachenko studied at the National Technical University of Ukraine, taking a bachelor’s degree in economics and a master’s in computer science, and founded a web development company in Ukraine. He then joined MySQL AB, the Swedish company behind the MySQL database, as a performance engineer in the High-Performance Group of its support organisation. His expertise in LAMP performance and multi-threaded programming went into optimising MySQL and InnoDB internals, and Oracle and its predecessors incorporated his source code patches into the mainstream products.

In 2006 he and Peter Zaitsev started Percona to offer support for MySQL. The company’s own timeline traces what followed: the Percona XtraDB storage engine in 2008, Percona XtraBackup in 2009, Percona Server for MySQL and round-the-clock support in 2010, Percona Toolkit and the first Percona Live conference in 2011, Percona XtraDB Cluster in 2012, and a move beyond MySQL into MongoDB in 2015 and PostgreSQL in 2018. As Chief Technology Officer he led Percona CTO Labs, which ran performance evaluations of Percona and third-party products across hardware, filesystems, storage engines and databases, and he supervised development of the company’s core server, backup and clustering products.

Percona now describes itself as a global, remote-only company of about 350 people, built around the argument that open source database users should not be locked into a vendor’s business model. Its leadership page lists Peter Farkas as CEO, Zaitsev as Founder and Tkachenko as Co-Founder and Technology Fellow.

In May 2026 Tkachenko became President of the founding board of the OurSQL Foundation, a 501(c)(6) non-profit set up to give the MySQL community vendor-neutral coordination, with board members from Percona, PlanetScale, PingCAP, VillageSQL and Alibaba among others. He presented the foundation at Percona Live 2026 the same day it launched. He lives in North Carolina.

Education

National Technical University of Ukraine

MS, Computer Science

National Technical University of Ukraine

BS, Economics