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Meet the 14 Best SQL Experts of the Year

sql experts - Meet the 14 Best SQL Experts of the Year

In the ever-evolving world of databases, a select group of SQL experts lead the way through their code, leadership, and community contributions. These individuals have distinguished themselves equally across open-source development, startup innovation (while still coding), influential blogging/education, engineering roles at tech giants, and even programming competitions.

Below is the updated list of the top 14 SQL-focused professionals worldwide, each of whom is active today and renowned for shaping the database landscape:

  1. Spencer Kimball
  2. Matei Zaharia
  3. Kimberly L. Tripp
  4. Benoit Dageville
  5. Sugu Sougoumarane
  6. Brent Ozar
  7. Markus Winand
  8. Joe Celko
  9. Steven Feuerstein
  10. Gwen Shapira
  11. Andy Pavlo
  12. Jeff Dean
  13. Hannes Mühleisen
  14. Karthik Ranganathan

Now, let’s delve into the accomplishments and impact of each of these SQL luminaries:

Spencer Kimball

YouTube Video

Nationality: American

Spencer Kimball is the co-founder and CEO of Cockroach Labs, the company behind CockroachDB – a distributed SQL database designed to survive disasters (“like a cockroach”).

An open-source veteran, Spencer first gained fame co-creating the GIMP image editor in college. After a decade at Google working on large-scale infrastructure (e.g. Colossus file system), he launched CockroachDB in 2014 to bring Google Spanner-like resilience to the masses. Under his leadership, CockroachDB has become a leading cloud-native SQL database for global applications. Spencer continues to apply his deep systems knowledge to database innovation, while evangelizing how to “scale resilient database solutions” in the cloud era.

Matei Zaharia

Nationality: Romanian

Matei Zaharia is the creator of Apache Spark, a unified analytics engine that brought SQL into the world of big data, and the co-founder/CTO of Databricks.

As a Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley, Matei developed Spark in 2009 to provide a faster, in-memory alternative to Hadoop MapReduce. Spark’s ability to run SQL (via Spark SQL and DataFrames) on massive data sets has enabled countless organizations to perform interactive querying on big data. In 2013, Matei co-founded Databricks to commercialize Spark and cloud data lakes, and he remains its Chief Technologist while also teaching at Stanford University. He has received the ACM Dissertation Award (2014) for his work on data processing frameworks. Today, Matei leads efforts on Delta Lake and MLflow, aiming to make data engineering and AI workflows simpler. Few people have done more to bridge the gap between the traditional SQL database world and modern big data platforms than Matei Zaharia.

Kimberly L. Tripp

Nationality: American

Kimberly Tripp is a SQL Server industry veteran renowned for her mastery of indexing and internals. She is the president/founder of SQLskills, a training and consulting firm, which she runs with her husband (Paul Randal).

With over 30 years of experience designing and tuning SQL Server solutions, Kimberly has long been a top-rated speaker at conferences like Microsoft TechEd, PASS Summit, and SQLintersection. Her lectures on indexing strategies, statistics, and fragmentation are considered essential knowledge for DBAs. Kimberly has also been a Microsoft MVP and authored numerous whitepapers and courses. Her SQLskills blog posts (e.g., “Eight Steps to Better Transaction Log Throughput”) and webcasts have helped countless SQL Server professionals. As a community keynote speaker and Redgate 100 Influencer, Kimberly is both a role model and an endless source of deep technical wisdom in the SQL Server realm.

Benoit Dageville

Benoit Dageville - Meet the 14 Best SQL Experts of the Year

Nationality: French

Benoit Dageville is co-founder of Snowflake Inc. and currently President of Products at the cloud data platform company.

A distinguished database engineer, Benoit spent 15 years at Oracle as a lead architect for the Oracle Parallel SQL engine and the Oracle RAC database cluster. In 2012, he left Oracle to start Snowflake, re-imagining the data warehouse for the cloud. Benoit’s expertise in parallel query execution and self-tuning systems helped Snowflake build a scalable, fully-managed SQL data warehouse from scratch. Today Snowflake is an industry giant, and Benoit (holder of 80+ patents) still codes on weekends to stay connected to the technology. He is widely regarded for “revolutionizing the future of computing” in data analytics.

Sugu Sougoumarane

Nationality: Indian

Sugu Sougoumarane is the co-creator of Vitess – the clustering middleware that scaled YouTube’s MySQL – and co-founder/CTO of PlanetScale (a database-as-a-service based on Vitess).

Sugu’s background includes stints at PayPal and Google/YouTube, where he helped design Vitess to shard YouTube’s massive MySQL databases. Vitess later became a Cloud Native Computing Foundation project powering systems like Slack and Square. At PlanetScale, Sugu has brought Vitess’s limitless MySQL scalability to developers as an accessible service. He’s a prominent voice on distributed SQL, sharing lessons on building a truly horizontally-scalable relational backend. His work enables MySQL to remain reliable at extreme scale.

Brent Ozar

Your database server is like a hotel. Don’t vacuum it when it’s full.

Nationality: American

Brent Ozar is a Microsoft SQL Server performance tuning guru and a beloved educator in the SQL community.

As founder of Brent Ozar Unlimited, he has helped thousands of companies make SQL Server “go faster!” Brent is one of a rare few Microsoft Certified Masters, a former PASS Summit keynote speaker, and a prolific author of blogs, scripts (like sp_Blitz), and training courses. He is known for his entertaining, straight-talking style and real-world advice on database administration. With a background as a DBA and developer, Brent has built a huge following through his webcasts and blogs. He exemplifies community leadership—bridging hardcore technical insight with approachability—earning him a spot among the most influential database personalities.

Markus Winand

Markus Winand - Meet the 14 Best SQL Experts of the Year

Nationality: Austrian

Markus Winand is a SQL performance evangelist known as the “SQL Renaissance Ambassador” for his efforts to modernize developers’ understanding of SQL features.

He is the author of SQL Performance Explained, a book praised as a “must-read” for developers, and the creator of Use The Index, Luke, a website teaching practical indexing and query tuning to developers. Through his newer site ModernSQL.com, Markus highlights advanced SQL features (window functions, CTEs, etc.) that have emerged since the 1990s, dispelling myths that SQL is “outdated.” He provides training and consulting to companies worldwide, showing how to write efficient, set-oriented SQL. Markus’s accessible writing and online tutorials have empowered countless developers to get the most out of their relational databases by using SQL correctly and effectively.

Joe Celko

Nationality: American

Joe Celko is a celebrated SQL author and one of the early members of the ANSI SQL standards committee.

He is famous for his tricky SQL puzzles and for writing the influential books SQL for Smarties, SQL Puzzles & Answers, and others which have challenged SQL practitioners for decades. Celko’s tenure on the SQL standards committee (SQL-89 and SQL-92) helped shape the language and his writings introduced many to advanced SQL techniques (like hierarchical queries with nested sets). Known for his distinctive, no-nonsense style on forums and in articles, he has won the DBMS Magazine Readers’ Choice Award several years running. Now semi-retired, Joe Celko still shares his SQL wisdom through publications and occasionally online, continuing to influence SQL best practices and puzzle enthusiasts worldwide.

Steven Feuerstein

Steven Feuerstein - Meet the 14 Best SQL Experts of the Year

Nationality: American

Steven Feuerstein is one of the world’s leading experts on Oracle PL/SQL programming. He has written 10 books on PL/SQL (notably Oracle PL/SQL Programming, considered the “Bible” for PL/SQL developers).

Steven was Oracle Corporation’s Developer Advocate for PL/SQL from 2014 to 2021, promoting best practices and running the Oracle Dev Gym for SQL/PLSQL workouts. With a career focused exclusively on Oracle database programming since 1994, he has trained countless developers through his books, blogs, and conference talks. Now a senior advisor at an Oracle consultancy, he continues to share tips and code (and still writes PL/SQL daily). Steven’s passion for teaching and his approachable humor have made him a beloved figure in the SQL world, especially among Oracle professionals.

 

Gwen Shapira

Nationality: Israeli

Gwen Shapira is a leading data architect and advocate known for her expertise in both relational databases and streaming systems.

An Oracle ACE Director early in her career, Gwen made a name optimizing Oracle databases and sharing her knowledge via blogs and user groups. She then transitioned into the big-data space – joining Cloudera as a solutions architect and later becoming a founding engineer and product manager at Confluent, working on Apache Kafka and its SQL layer (ksqlDB). Gwen frequently speaks about integrating databases with streaming platforms and has co-authored “Kafka: The Definitive Guide.” She’s a consistent voice on social media and at conferences about topics like database reliability, data pipelines, and balancing SQL with NoSQL. Recently, Gwen joined NVIDIA, applying her data expertise to GPU-accelerated analytics. Her broad experience across SQL and streaming make her insights especially valuable in modern data architecture discussions.

Andy Pavlo

Andy Pavlo - Meet the 14 Best SQL Experts of the Year

Nationality: American

Andy Pavlo is a professor of databaseology (yes, he coined that term) at Carnegie Mellon University and an entrepreneur shaping the future of self-driving databases.

At CMU, Andy leads cutting-edge research on autonomous database systems, HTAP engines, and benchmarking. He was the co-founder and CEO of OtterTune, a startup that uses AI to automatically tune database configurations. Known for his energetic “honest” take on database systems, Andy hosts the CMU Database Group YouTube series, bringing academic database internals to a broad audience. He has authored core research on in-memory databases (Peloton/NoisePage) and evangelizes how automation and machine learning can optimize SQL performance. Equally at home on the whiteboard or in the code, Andy Pavlo is inspiring the next generation of database engineers with his blend of academic insight and real-world pragmatism.

Jeff Dean

Nationality: American

Jeff Dean is not a database specialist per se – he’s a Google Senior Fellow and legendary engineer – but his contributions to distributed data systems have profoundly influenced modern SQL databases.

Jeff co-designed Google Bigtable, a petabyte-scale semi-structured datastore, and Google Spanner, a globally-distributed SQL database with external consistency. Spanner’s 2012 reveal (with its novel TrueTime API) changed industry perceptions of what SQL systems could do, inspiring a new wave of NewSQL databases. Earlier, Jeff was a key developer of MapReduce and other Google infrastructure that shaped big data processing. Many NewSQL and cloud database innovations trace back to ideas in Bigtable and Spanner. Currently Google’s Chief Scientist (leading AI research), Jeff remains an iconic figure. Database engineers worldwide still read his papers to learn how to build scalable, reliable systems – making his work indirectly foundational to the state of SQL today.

Hannes Mühleisen

Hannes Muhleisen - Meet the 14 Best SQL Experts of the Year

Nationality: German

Dr. Hannes Mühleisen is co-creator of DuckDB, an in-process analytical SQL database that has been dubbed the “SQLite for analytics.”

As a researcher at CWI Amsterdam, Hannes and his colleague Mark Raasveldt built DuckDB to deliver fast columnar query processing in a zero-dependency package. Now co-founder and CEO of DuckDB Labs, Hannes oversees DuckDB’s development as it rapidly gains adoption for data science workloads. He has a PhD in parallel databases and continues to publish database research, recently being honored with the Dutch ICT Research Award 2025 for his innovative work. Hannes’s vision is to embed SQL analytics everywhere (from Edge devices to Jupyter notebooks), and DuckDB’s popularity indicates he’s succeeding. His blend of academic excellence and practical engineering makes him a rising star in the SQL world.

Karthik Ranganathan

Nationality: Indian

Karthik Ranganathan is co-founder and CTO of Yugabyte, the company behind YugabyteDB, a high-performance distributed SQL database.

At Facebook in the 2000s, Karthik was an early engineer on the team that built Apache Cassandra and HBase for the company’s massive data needs. In 2016, he and colleagues applied that expertise to found Yugabyte, aiming to bring PostgreSQL’s SQL capabilities to a globally distributed, cloud-native platform. YugabyteDB combines auto-sharding and fault tolerance with full SQL and has become a leading open-source NewSQL database. Karthik frequently shares insights on distributed SQL, blending deep database internals knowledge with real-world use cases from cloud deployments. Under his technical leadership, YugabyteDB is helping organizations achieve unlimited scale without giving up SQL consistency.

Wrap Up

These legends represent exceptional talent, making them extremely challenging to headhunt. However, there are thousands of other highly skilled IT professionals available to hire with our help. Contact us, and we will be happy to discuss your hiring needs.

Note: We’ve dedicated significant time and effort to creating and verifying this curated list of top talent. If you intend to share or make use of it in any way, we kindly ask that you include a backlink to the original source – EchoGlobal.

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