BARON SCHWARTZ is a software engineer who lives in Charlottesville, Virginia and goes by the online handle of "Xaprb," which is his first name typed in QWERTY on a Dvorak keyboard. When he's not busy solving a fun programming challenge, he relaxes with his wife Lynn and dog Carbon. He blogs about software engineering at http://www.xaprb.com/blog/. PETER ZAITSEV, a former manager of the High Performace Group at MySQL AB, now runs the mysqlperformanceblog.com site. 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 to software (such as query optimization) in order to find solutions. He also speaks frequently at conferences. VADIM TKANCHENKO was a Performance Engineer in 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. JEREMY ZAWODNY and his two cats moved from Northwest Ohio to Silicon Valley in late 1999 so he could work for Yahoo!--just in time to witness the .com bubble bursting first-hand. He's been at Yahoo! ever since, helping to put MySQL and other Open Source technologies to use 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. He then helped to spread "the MySQL religion" to numerous other groups within Yahoo!, including News, Personals, Sports, and Shopping. Nowadays he acts as Yahoo!'s MySQL guru, working with Yahoo!'s many engineering groups to get the most out of their MySQL deployments. In 2000, he began writing for Linux Magazine and continues to do so today as a columnist and contributing editor. After over a year of active participation on the MySQL mailing list, he got the idea to write a book about MySQL. (How hard could it be, really?) You can still find him answering questions on the list today. Since 2001, Jeremy has been speaking about MySQL at various conferences (O'Reilly's Open Source Conference, PHPCon, The MySQL User Conference, etc.) and user groups in locations as far away as Bangalore, India. His favorite topics are performance tuning, replication, clustering, and backup/recovery. In more recent times, he's rediscovered his love of aviation, earning a Private Pilot Glider license in early 2003. Since then he's spent far too much of his free time flying gliders out of Hollister, California and Truckee, near Lake Tahoe. He hopes to soon earn his Commercial Pilot license and then go on to become a certified flight instructor someday. Occasional MySQL consulting also helps to pay for his flying addiction. Jeremy rambles almost daily about technology and life in general on his weblog: www.jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/ ARJEN LENTZ was born in Amsterdam, but now lives in Queensland Australia. Together with Harmony he has a beautiful daughter named Phoebe and a black cat named Figaro. Originally a C programmer, Arjen was employee #25 at MySQL AB (2001-2007), dealing with the MySQL Manual (2001-2004), global Community Relations (2004-2006), the MySQL Users Conference (2005-2006), teaching MySQL Training courses (2001-2007), and MySQL Support Engineering (2006-2007). After a brief break in 2007, Arjen founded Open Query (http://openquery.com.au), which develops and provides its own MySQL and other open source training and consulting services in the Asia Pacific region and beyond, as well as open source business and community strategy advice. DEREK J. BALLING has been a Perl programmer and UNIX/Linux system administrator since 1996, having helped build two different ISPs from the ground up in the midwestern United States. He spent several years of his career at Yahoo!, working in their Infrastructure Group, where he worked on tools to help improve system uptime. He presently works as a system administrator at Vassar College. He has also written articles for The Perl Journal and a number of online magazines. When not working on computer-related issues, Derek relaxes with his two cats in his lakeside residence, and has recently taken up the sport of fencing. He also makes his opinion known on current events or whatever is annoying him lately on his blog at http://www.megacity.org/blog/.
