About

I’m Ricardo Jiménez-Peris — Ric. I’ve spent most of my career researching and building distributed database systems.

For 25 years I was an academic researcher at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, working on distributed databases, especially replication and MVCC. I also taught distributed systems and spent a postdoc at ETH Zürich with Gustavo Alonso. During the last five of those years, I built the prototype that eventually became LeanXcale.

I then spent 11 years building LeanXcale as a company, leading it as CEO and CTO. LeanXcale is a distributed HTAP SQL database, and taking a database from research prototype to a system running real workloads changes the questions you ask: not only whether an idea is correct, but how it behaves under load, how it fails, how it scales, and which architectural decisions are difficult to undo.

I’m currently working on Beyond 5 Seconds, a public open-source project around FoundationDB exploring how to extend MVCC beyond its current five-second transaction window.

This site is where I take database systems apart and look at the ideas behind them. The first series focuses on FoundationDB — following its architecture and transaction path in detail, and comparing its design choices with those of other databases.

If you want to talk about any of this, LinkedIn is the easiest way to reach me.