We’re a team of the world’s most highly skilled experts in MySQL, web applications, and related technologies. All of us are business leaders and entrepreneurs as well as master coders. Together, we have tremendous experience and expertise that reaches far beyond the MySQL world.
Authors for the Second Edition
The second edition’s authors came together through friendship and a mutual desire to pick up where the first edition left off, plus add an entirely new perspective and set of expertise to the book. The second edition differs from the first edition in more than just size and scope (it’s nearly three times as large!) — it adds tremendous depth, crams more information into fewer pages with a more concise writing style, and brings the perspective of mission-critical system-building to the book. If you rely on MySQL to make money, the second edition is for you.
Baron Schwartz
Baron is the Consulting Team Lead at Percona, author of the Maatkit toolkit for MySQL, and author of the innotop real-time MySQL monitoring tool. He maintains Xaprb, a popular blog about MySQL and related technical topics, and is a regular contributor to the MySQL Performance Blog.
Peter Zaitsev
A former manager of the High Performance Group at MySQL AB, Peter is the co-founder, Chief Executive Officer, and Lead Consultant at Percona. He specializes in helping administrators fix issues with Web sites handling millions of visitors a day, dealing with terabytes of data using hundreds of servers. He is used to making changes and upgrades both to hardware and to software (such as query optimization) in order to find solutions. He also speaks frequently at conferences
and is a regular contributor to the MySQL Performance Blog.
Vadim Tkachenko
Vadim Tkachenko was a Performance Engineer at MySQL AB. As an expert in multithreaded programming and synchronization, his primary tasks were benchmarks, profiling, and finding bottlenecks. He also worked on a number of features for performance monitoring and tuning, and getting MySQL to scale well on multiple CPUs. Vadim is the co-founder, Chief Technology Officer, and Senior Consultant at Percona. He is a regular contributor to the MySQL Performance Blog.
Arjen Lentz
Arjen was born in Amsterdam but has lived in Queensland Australia since the turn of the millennium, sharing his life these days with his beautiful daughter Phoebe and black cat Figaro. Originally a C programmer, Arjen was employee #25 at MySQL AB (2001-2007). After a brief break in 2007, Arjen founded Open Query, which develops and provides its own data management training and consulting services in the Asia Pacific region and beyond. Arjen also regularly speaks at conferences and user groups. In his abundant spare time Arjen indulges in cooking, gardening, reading, camping, and exploring the RepRap. Arjen also maintains a weblog at http://arjen-lentz.livejournal.com/.
Authors for the First Edition
The first edition of this book, written in 2004, has aged gracefully over the years. It remains a classic you can find in almost any MySQL DBA’s bookshelf. The second edition retains the overall organization and some of the content (MySQL Architecture, Security) from the first edition, though even this is completely revised and greatly expanded in the second edition.
Jeremy Zawodny
Jeremy helped to put MySQL and other Open Source technologies to use at Yahoo! in fun, interesting, and often very big ways. Starting with the popular and high-traffic Yahoo! Finance site, he worked to make MySQL part of the site’s core infrastructure in large batch operations as well as real-time feed processing and serving content directly on the site. Nowadays he acts as Yahoo!’s MySQL guru, working with Yahoo!’s many engineering groups to get the most out of their MySQL deployments. Jeremy rambles almost daily about technology and life in general on his weblog: www.jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/.
Derek J. Balling
Derek has been a Linux system administrator since 1996. He has helped build and maintain server infrastructure for companies like Yahoo, and institutions like Vassar College. He is currently employed as the Data Center Manager for Answers.com. When not working on computer-related issues, Derek enjoys spending time with his wife Debbie, and their posse of animals (4 cats and a dog). He also makes his opinion known on current events or whatever is annoying him lately on his blog at http://blog.megacity.org/.
