Ian Merrington, a member of the OTT Persistence engineering team at Sky U.K., plays a key role in ensuring the successful management of Couchbase across the company by developing necessary tools and serving as an escalation point for related issues. Based at Sky’s Osterley Campus in London, Ian's background as an Oracle DBA and his experience with projects like migrating the Sky Identity platform to a new data center using Couchbase's XDCR feature have solidified his preference for Couchbase due to its simplicity and effective replication capabilities. Outside of his professional life, Ian is a music enthusiast who enjoys playing the guitar and attending local music venues. He appreciates Couchbase for its audit log and user roles that align with traditional RDBMS standards and suggests improvements like more granular metric windows and additional monitoring plugins. Additionally, Ian admires authors Douglas Adams and Douglas Coupland, with a particular fondness for Adams' humorous and insightful sci-fi narratives and Coupland's book "Microserfs," which captures the essence of workplace camaraderie.