@@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
 ---
 title: "“MySQL Is Still the Backbone”: Zongzhi Chen on Hot Rows, PolarDB, and the Agent Era"
-description: "Zongzhi Chen of Alibaba Cloud on why China runs on MySQL, what Singles Day does to a database, and what MySQL has to change before AI agents pick the next default."
+description: "Zongzhi Chen, an individual MySQL contributor, on why China runs on MySQL, what Singles Day does to a database, and what MySQL has to change before AI agents pick the next default."
 date: 2026-10-14
 tags:
 - Interview
@@ -15,7 +15,7 @@ interview:
   audio_url: ""
 ---
 
-*Zongzhi Chen leads the cloud RDS team at Alibaba Cloud. He was a core member of the team that shipped the first release of PolarDB, created the open source Redis-compatible database Pika, and sits on the Founding Board of the OurSQL Foundation. We talked about why China runs on MySQL, what Singles Day does to a database, and what MySQL has to change before AI agents pick the next default.*
+*Zongzhi Chen is an individual MySQL contributor who has worked on the MySQL source code for more than 10 years. He was a core member of the team that shipped the first release of PolarDB, created the open source Redis-compatible database Pika, and sits on the Founding Board of the OurSQL Foundation. We talked about why China runs on MySQL, what Singles Day does to a database, and what MySQL has to change before AI agents pick the next default. Views expressed are his own and do not represent his employer.*
 
 ## From Redis to the storage engine
 
 
@@ -1,9 +1,8 @@
 ---
 title: "Zongzhi Chen"
 url: "/resources/member-directory/people/zongzhi-chen/"
-description: "Board member of the OurSQL Foundation and Manager of the Cloud RDS Team at Alibaba."
-role: "Board Member, OurSQL Foundation · Manager, Cloud RDS Team, Alibaba"
-company: "Alibaba"
+description: "Board member of the OurSQL Foundation and Independent MySQL Contributor."
+role: "Board Member, OurSQL Foundation · Independent MySQL Contributor"
 project: "AliSQL"
 project_url: "/resources/software/alisql/"
 subcategories:
@@ -14,6 +13,6 @@ images:
 - photo.png
 ---
 
-Zongzhi Chen is Manager of the Cloud RDS Team at Alibaba, where he works on cloud database technologies and managed database services. His work is connected to the design, operation, and evolution of large-scale cloud database systems, including RDS and cloud-native database infrastructure. He is one of the primary authors of PolarDB. His main contribution was optimizing PolarDB to be cloud-native database — the specific details are in the CloudJump I/II/III papers. He brings the perspective of a major cloud provider to the OurSQL Foundation board and to discussions about the future of MySQL-compatible technologies in cloud environments.
+Zongzhi Chen is an individual MySQL contributor with more than 10 years of experience working on the MySQL source code. His work at Alibaba includes serving as a core member of the team that brought PolarDB to commercial availability and authoring the CloudJump I/II/III papers on cloud-native database architecture; before that, he created Pika, an open source Redis-compatible database, at 360. His career has focused on storage engines, cloud-native database infrastructure, and contributing fixes and proposals upstream, including being one of the top MySQL bug reporters in 2019.
 
 **Connect:** [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/zongzhi-chen-35a77a40/) · [X](https://x.com/baotiao) · [GitHub](https://github.com/baotiao)