beer planet

Updated: April 8th, 2008

If you're serious about MySQL, it doesn't hurt to know the people closely tied to its development and maintenance as well as famous bloggers. Here's my ongoing list of people I consider important:

Peter Zaitsev - MySQL Performance Blog, former head of MySQL AB High Performance Group. His company Percona is available for consulting. He's a co-author of High Performance MySQL 2nd edition (great book).

Baron Schwartz - also know as Xaprb, Baron a co-author of High Performance MySQL 2nd edition and creator of innotop and Maatkit. Maatkit is simply brilliant, and so is Baron. Baron recently joined Peter Zaitsev at Percona.

Jeremy Zawodny - MySQL guru, works for Yahoo, and is considered a legend. He wrote mytop and both editions of High Performance MySQL 2nd edition among other things. Here's Jeremy's twitter. I suggest subscribing to his rss feed as his blog is quite interesting and versatile.

Paul McCullagh - developer of the PBXT transactional storage engine for MySQL.

Ronald Bradford - active blogger and a recent addition to PrimeBase Technologies, the maker of PBXT.

Roland Bouman - a MySQL developer and blogger, active in the community. He likes to post really, really, REALLY long but detailed and informative posts. He's one of the speakers at the upcoming MySQL conference (as most of the people here, actually).

Jan Kneschke - senior software developer in the MySQL AB Enterprise Tools team. He maintains the MySQL Proxy and the awesome lighttpd web server (!!!).

Giuseppe Maxia - a MySQL QA developer and tester for MySQL Proxy. Giuseppe loves LUA and maintains a blog called The Data Charmer where he writes about the MySQL Proxy a lot.

The Pythian Group - a group of ingenious DBAs (who also blog). This company does remote DB management and consulting.

Paul Vallee - CEO of The Pythian Group. A smart, dedicated, really great guy.

Sheeri Cabral - a very active and insightful blogger and speaker who also happens to work for The Pythian Group. She posts often and calls herself a MySQL She-BA.

Farhan (Frank) Mashraqi - Director of Database Infrastructure at fotolog.com, one of the top 15 sites in the world. He maintains a blog called MySQL Database Administration.

… more to come.

If you want to see some pictures of these fascinating people, head over to:

• http://jcole.us/gallery/uc2006

Artem Russakovskii is a San Francisco programmer, blogger, and future millionaire (that last part is in the works). Follow Artem on Twitter (@ArtemR) or subscribe to the RSS feed.

In the meantime, if you found this article useful, feel free to buy me a cup of coffee below.