Q&A With Our CTO, Mathias: How Community Feedback Shapes Releases
From new connectors and performance improvements to integrations like MLflow, much of what ships in Exasol’s releases originates from real-world customer feedback.
To explore how this process works, we sat down with Mathias Golombek, our Chief Technology Officer (CTO), to talk about collaboration, community, and how user insights influence what gets built next.
Q: Many users ask how their feedback influences Exasol’s roadmap. What happens once a suggestion comes in?
Mathias: Every piece of feedback enters a structured evaluation process. It doesn’t matter whether it comes from our Community forum, GitHub issues, support cases, or direct conversations with customers. All of it gets logged, categorized, and reviewed.
We evaluate on three main axes:
- Relevance and frequency: Are multiple customers experiencing this? Does it show up in multiple industries or deployment patterns?
- Technical feasibility: Is this a small improvement, or does it touch core architectural components?
- Long-term impact: Will this help more teams build efficiently, scale faster, or improve reliability?
Some updates go straight into our next sprint. Others require planning across multiple release cycles. But the underlying principle is simple: if it helps customers solve real problems at scale, it becomes a priority.
Q: What type of feedback is most actionable for the engineering team?
Mathias: The most useful feedback is always tied to a real-world scenario. We don’t just want to know that something could be better, we want to know why.
Three types of insights stand out:
1. Concrete use cases
When customers explain their actual workloads (volumes, query patterns, concurrency levels), it helps us understand the constraints they face.
2. Performance observations
If you’re hitting bottlenecks under certain conditions, even if the issue is not obvious, that data point helps us reproduce and fix performance challenges.
3. Integration extensions
Whether it’s a new BI tool, a data loading technology, the integration of agentic AI via the MCP Server, MLflow, Python, or another elements in the ecosystem, understanding what you are envisioning to build helps us refine our product strategy around connectors, documentation, and workflows.
In short: the more context we get, the better and faster we can act. Your insights directly influence our direction, often more than you might expect. Many of the improvements you see today exist because someone spoke up, shared a friction point, or proposed a new idea.
Q: For users who want to contribute publicly, what opportunities are available?
Mathias: There are several ways customers can grow their influence and contribute to the broader Exasol community:
1. Let us promote your successes
We regularly highlight case studies, Xpert quotes, and technical wins. If you want visibility for your team or company, we’re more than happy to help amplify that. Just contact me directly under mag@exasol.com or via my LinkedIn profile!
2. Post questions, tips or insights
We encourage you to join our Community forum and share your thoughts with the broader user community as they are incredibly valuable for other users in the Exasol community. Let’s start discussions about shared challenges, tips on how to use Exasol in the best way, or post your future product visions for the Exasol analytics engine.
3. Join the Exasol developer community
Many customers contribute their own code improvements, documentation enhancements or feature requests directly to the large number of Exasol’s open source Github repos.
Closing Thoughts
Exasol’s strength comes not only from its architecture, but from the vivid community of engineers, analysts, and data leaders who use it every day.
Your insights, challenges, and successes shape the product more than anything else. Thank you for being an active part of that journey. If you have something to share (big or small), I’d love to hear it: mag@exasol.com or via my LinkedIn profile!