MySQL Guilds - Member Profiles

Adam is the manager of technical evangelism at eBay, where he preaches the gospel of the eBay platform to developers and businessmen around the globe.

Adam began using PHP and MySQL in 1997, is the author of Upgrading to PHP 5 and coauthor of PHP Cookbook, both published by O'Reilly Media. He lives in San Francisco, California, and has a B.A. and M.B.A. from Columbia University.

Adam has spoken at OSCON and the entire LAMP stack of conferences: LinxuWorld, ApacheCon, MySQL Users Conference, and PHPCon. He usually speaks on PHP, with an specialization on MySQL, XML, Web services, and PHP 5. In particular, he talks on PHP 5, MySQL 5, and the new PHP MySQLi extension.

Adam also chaired the OSCON 2005 PHP selection committee, and was on the board of the International PHP Conference and the Zend PHP Conference.

Alex is a student starting his first year at Durham University (Trevs) studing Economics. As well as MySQL he also has experience with PHP and running linux webservers and clusters.

When he is not in front of a computer he has been involved in student radio stations, newspapers, adventerous training activities, military training and Athletics and Cross Country running.

Alex runs LAMP setups for mid-sized website clusters. He is always looking for ways to improve uptimes and increase performance! He is also keen to help others who are struggling with the basics of MySQL cluster or anything else that he can help with.

Andi, along with Zeev Suraski, is the architect of the Zend Engine, which provides the core of PHP since version 4.0. Andi continues to play a leadership role in the PHP community, and is a member of both the PHP Group and the Apache Software Foundation. Recently, Andi spearheaded the Zend Engine II's object-oriented improvements for the newly released PHP 5 release. Additionally, he brings a rich background in enterprise software development including real-time avionics simulation software and n-tier J2EE applications.

Gutmans holds a B.A. in Computer Science from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology.

With Zeev, Andi wrote the tab completion in the mysql command line client. He has been a speaker at MySQL conferences and has worked for years with the MySQL team both as part of PHP and the Zend partnership with MySQL.

Andrew is a database/web developer with over 7 years in the IT industry. His main area of expertise was Oracle but started using MySQL as an alternative 2 years ago. Being an Oracle PL/SQL developer he became interested in the (at the time) upcoming release of MySQL 5.0 and started writing white papers and tips related to Stored Procedure development in MySQL.

Andrew started MySQLDevelopment.com in late 2004 to help other developers get to grips with Procedures in MySQL, he's also a sysop on the Quest MySQL pipelines, his blog is aggregated on PlanetMySQL.org and is a regular contributor to the MySQL forums.

Beat Vontobel (born 1975 in Winterthur, Switzerland) works in research and development and as a sysadmin for MeteoNews GmbH, where one of his many tasks was to manage the transition from Microsoft SQL Server to MySQL. MeteoNews does the weather forecasts for most of the biggest media (newspapers, web, radio and tv) in Switzerland and provides weather related services for special interest and international customers as well.

Personally he always tried to combine as many of his interests (computers, linguistics, journalism, music, natural science) as possible in his jobs. Before 2002, when he started to dig into computers and natural science again at MeteoNews, he was editor in chief at RADIO TOP (now Switzerland's number two private radio station), where he's still a member of the board. He also still teaches courses twice a year at the Swiss Journalism School maz.

Whereas now he deals mainly with Perl, SQL, Bash and PHP, his earlier experience with computers includes natural language parsers in Prolog as well as some musical experiments with DSP processors. But actually everything started back in the times of the Atari ST, when he loved to tweak the OS with hacks in Motorola's 68'000 assembler.

You can read his blog on MySQL at http://www.futhark.ch/mysql and reach him at b.vontobel@meteonews.ch.

Bill Karwin has been a professional software developer and manager since 1987. He works from his home office in Watsonville, California. Bill advocates a holistic approach to software engineering, with attention to setting goals, planning, documentation, and education as well as technology, coding, and testing.

Usage of MySQL:
Developer of web applications, IT automation, and configuration management.

Conferences:
Speaker at Borland Developer's Conference, 1995-1999

Newsgroups frequented:
mailing.database.mysql
comp.databases
comp.databases.mysql

Bob is a former system manager of VMS departmental and enterprise-level systems and system programmer on said systems. After years of working with what are now legacy systems, he turned his attention to the open-source arena, after having worked some with Microsoft products such as Access. His first experience in SQL was VMS/RDB and a piece of software called SQL Assist. He now works interacts with MySQL via the command line, via the C API, and increasingly via PHP, and brings his years of data processing expertise to the MySQL community, applying common sense solutions to peoples' every-day problems.

He currently lives in Phoenix, Arizona, and has a B.A. from Earlham College. He has been involved with IT professionally for 20+ years. He has done a lot of programming and system management, written some corporate in-house technical documentation, and also led some corporate in-house training.

He reads all of the English-language forums, most of the lists, and some of the foreign language ones as well, especially French. He spends a lot of time working with the newbies but is also seen on a number of other forums as well.

You can read his blog at http://bobfield.blogspot.com and reach him at bfield4@cox.net.

Brian currently works on the MySQL Database Engine and spends the rest of his time working on Apache, MySQL and Perl modules, which include mod_layout and the Apache streaming services module, mod_mp3. In the past, he has been involved with projects for the Army Engineer Corps, The Virtual Hospital, and Slashdot. He currently works for MySQL as Director of Architecture and lives in Seattle with his dog Rosalynd.

Christian lives in Germany, and is currently employed as a programmer/system administrator. He has been involved with Unix/Linux since 1994 and became a Debian developer in 1998. Christian is the Debian maintainer for MySQL since 1999.

David lives in Adelaide, South Australia. He began working with databases some 25 years ago using Pick. He now works for Hewlett Packard Managed Services, providing Database Administration Services, using MySQL amongst other technologies, to customers. He began working with MySQL approximately 2 years ago and is active on various of the MySQL lists. David is also skilled with several other databases, PHP, Linux/Unix and uses Perl and the excellent DBI/DBD interface daily for administrative purposes.

Felix Geerinckx is an IT professional who lives in Belgium and works for an organization that provides IT solutions for local governments.

He is responsible for the company's own administrative applications, and has been involved with MySQL since 2000, mainly using it as a relational alternative to the different non-SQL databases that constitute the operational data of the organization.

Georg Richter is the author of PHP's mysql extensions. He works for MySQL as a Senior Developer (SAP R/3 porting project, PHP's mysql extensions, Connector/OO.org), contributes code to various Open Source projects and is a member of the Apache Software Foundation.

Giuseppe is a systems analyst and database designer with 20 years of IT experience. He deals with data analysis and migration, performance optimization, general wizardry and is the founding partner and CTO of Stardata s.r.l..

Giuseppe has spoken at several Open Source conferences (MySQL UC 2003, 2004, OSDBCon 2005, Linux Expo, Webbit and more), in his home country and abroad. He is a well known contributor to PerlMonks and several mailing lists on MySQL and databases in Italian and English.

He has worked with MySQL databases since 2001, when he designed and developed a large database system for an international organization. After founding his company, he has been a consultant on database matters, mostly MySQL related, and has become an authoritative voice on MySQL in Italy and abroad.

Recently, he launched a project to create a repository for MySQL general purpose stored routines and has written in his blog and MySQL forums about ways of improving MySQL::SP language.

He has written articles for various sites (MySQL, OnLamp, DevShed) and several fallen trees magazines, mostly in Italian, but also SysAdmin. Has a plan for a book on MySQL Wizardry, and still looking for a publisher.

You may meet Giuseppe at technical meetings, online forums, chess tournaments, good bookstores and airport lounges (where he travels from one task to the next).

In September 2006, Giuseppe joined the MySQL Quality Assurance Team.

Heikki (born 1964 in Helsinki, Finland) is the creator of the InnoDB transactional storage engine in MySQL. He founded Innobase Oy in 1995 and is the CEO of that company.

Heikki still does much of the InnoDB support and bug fixing, though most of the new code in InnoDB is written by other Innobase Oy developers. Prior to founding Innobase Oy, Tuuri worked as a researcher and teaching assistant at the University of Helsinki, from which he also received a Ph.D, degree in mathematical logic in 1990.

Ian lives in Cape Town, South Africa. He is the author of the book 'Mastering MySQL 4', published by Sybex, and began to work with MySQL in 1997, at a small ahead-of-their-time startup that was trying to sell Linux desktops, amongst other things.

These days he develops mainly in PHP and MySQL, although confesses to starting out with BASIC and COBOL, way back when, and still has a soft spot for Perl. He developed South Africa's first online grocery store, and has developed and taught internet development and other technical courses for various institutions. He has majors in Programming and Information Systems, as well as English and Philosophy.

For 5 years he was Lead Developer and IT Manager for Independent Online, South Africa's premier news portal. However, being a classic Gemini he has now 'retired' from the mundanity of fulltime work, and spends his time practising tai chi, studying clinical nutrition, and getting involved in various ventures that tickle his many fancies. He's hoping that his next book will be more in the style of William Blake and Allen Ginsberg.

Jay is a co-author of the recently published Pro MySQL (Apress, 2005), which covers all of the newest MySQL 5 features, as well as in-depth discussion and analysis of the MySQL server architecture, storage engines, transaction procesing, benchmarking, and advanced SQL scenarios. You can also see his name on articles appearing in Linux Magazine and can read more articles about MySQL at his website, http://jpipes.com.

For the past ten years, Jay Pipes has worked with all kinds of companies, big and small, to identify the value of the information they collect and help them build software that best addresses their business needs. From e-commerce to work order management systems, Jay has been involved in projects using both Microsoft and open source technologies. Passionate about programming and all things technical, Jay now runs his own consulting business in Columbus, Ohio. When not being bothered by his two cats, two dogs, and a constantly ringing phone, he can be found, headphones pulled across his ears, happily coding away at home. You can typically find him answering questions on the MySQL forums, and can read about his latest goings-on at http://jpipes.com. He can always be reached at jay@jpipes.com.

In January 2006, Jay joined the MySQL Community Relations Team.

Marc has been a software developer since 1980 and lives in Qu�bec, Canada, teaching (part-time) in networks, Linux, databases and secu He is a member of the phpMyAdmin development team -- phpMyAdmin is a popular web interface for MySQL. Marc is also a member of his family's development team, having four children.

Marc was a speaker at MySQL UC 2005 in Santa Clara, California and he also presented phpMyAdmin at LinuxTag 2005 in Karlsruhe, Germany.

Marc has written "Mastering phpMyAdmin for Effective MySQL Management" (ISBN 1-904811-03-5) and "phpMyAdmin - Gestion de bases de données SQL" (ISBN 2-7440-1955-0). Translations in Czech, German are available, with the Italian edition coming soon.

Mark has been working as a programmer, DBA, and sys admin for 10 years. His first web-related programming job was in 1995 where he was introduced to Linux, Perl, Apache, and PostgreSQL. Ever since then, Perl, Python, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Apache, Zope, and Linux were his hobbies and profession.

Back in 1998, he started his own Linux hardware company, which soon closed as the draw of Silicon Valley moved him away from Ohio. Since then, he has been lucky enough to work at either very progressive or well-known companies in the Bay Area. In his spare time, he tries to solve Ramsey numbers and may one day figure out how to solve them in the general sense.

Markus, born in 1975, is an Austrian software and web developer who concentrates on database related applications and primarily uses MySQL. In summer of 2005, he started the db4free.net project which provides free MySQL databases using the latest production and development versions. He writes about his experiences with MySQL in his weblog, tries to help other people on MySQL related newsgroups and has filed several bug reports for MySQL 5.

In May 2006, Markus joined the MySQL Web Team as a Web Developer.

Michael was born in 1967 in Innsbruck (Austria). In 1998 he completed his PhD in Computer Science at the Graz Technical University ("R-trees for Visualizing and Organizing Large 3D GIS Databases").

His first book was published by Sybex Germany in 1987. It explained graphics programming for the Atari ST. Since 1991 he has been writing various successful books for Addison Wesley Germany. These include books on Visual Basic, Client/Server Databases with VB, VBA programming for Excel, Linux, MySQL, PHP, Mathematica and Maple. Some of his books have been translated (English, French, Italian, Dutch, Polish and Chinese).

Michael came first in contact with MySQL when he developed a simple forum for his website. This was in 2000. Since then, he has used MySQL for various projects and with various programming languages. As he enjoyed working with MySQL, he decided to write a book about it. He is also the author of mssql2mysql, a free (GPL) database conversion tool from Microsoft SQL Server to MySQL.

Mike has been using MySQL for several years. In that time he has received both the MySQL Core and MySQL Professional certifications and has spoken at the 2003 and 2004 MySQL User Conferences. Mike is the webmaster of vbmysql.com, a site dedicated to helping Visual Basic developers use MySQL, and also volunteers as the resident MySQL expert in the Ask the Experts section of searchdatabase.com. Mike is the top ranked MySQL expert at Experts-Exchange.com. Mike Hillyer holds a Bachelor's Degree (Summa Cum Laude) in Computer Information Systems.

In April of 2004 Mike joined MySQL as a member of the documentation team and now spends his days writing in his basement and trying to take over the world. So far Mike has taken over the basement and is currently battling for the main floor of his house, but his wife seems to be winning.

Mike Kruckenberg is the technical manager of the Apache/Perl/MySQL-driven Tufts University Sciences Knowledgebase (TUSK). He is an active advocate for open source software in academia (and everywhere) and participates in numerous cross-institution collaboration projects.

Mike started using MySQL in 1999 for an online store written in PHP and has used MySQL for everything since. Mike has spent time both as an application developer using Perl, PHP, Python and Ruby with MySQL and as a MySQL DBA.

In 2005, Mike co-authored Pro MySQL (2005, Apress) and has written a bit for Linux Magazine. He has presented at OSCON on two different occasions and writes regularly on his weblog (mike.kruckenberg.com), contributes to Planet MySQL, and participates in the MySQL forums and mailing lists.

Peter works for MySQL and lives in Edmonton, Canada. He co-wrote four computer books, the latest was 'SQL Performance Tuning'.

Roland has been working for 7 years in IT. Hes currently working as an information analyst, database designer, web application developer and BI consultant for Inter Access in the Netherlands. Rolands work for Inter Access has been focussed mainly on Oracle technology and related products as well as XML/XSLT web development. For the past few years, Roland has become increasingly interested in open standards and open source software, with a focus on MySQL, MaxDB and PHP. Roland is living in Leiden, the Netherlands with his wife, Annemarie, their son David and their daughter Roos.

He maintains a web log at http://rpbouman.blogspot.com, which is also aggregated on PlanetMySQL.

In July 2006, Roland joined the MySQL Professional Services Team as a Certification Developer.

Stefan is the MySQL documentation team lead, a former MySQL trainer, and the German translator of the MySQL Reference Manual. He is also the translator of Paul DuBois' MySQL Cookbook, translator and author of MySQL-related German books, and the co-author of the MySQL Certification Study Guide which is available in its second edition now (August 2005).

Trudy has worked with SQL, and SQL DBMSs, since 1986. She has co-authored four books, including one thick book about the SQL Standard (SQL-99 Complete, Really) and one thin book about portability and optimization for DB2, Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, and four other DBMSs (SQL Performance Tuning). In August 2004, Trudy joined MySQL as part of the architecture team, where she assists in writing technical specifications for the developers. She also holds the position of Engineering Project Manager for MySQL.

Zak is a technical evangelist, author and programmer whose deep and constant love of free software and open source is turning him into a penguin. The only visible changes (so far) are a gradual accumulation of blubber, a loss of hair (which he hopes is the prelude to feather growth) and a growing preference for raw fish.

When not practicing how to waddle or wear a tuxedo, he helps businesses and free/open projects create and execute plans for their strategic, marketing, human resource, product, service, and information technology management activities.

To keep sane, he works as an editor on various cool free/open book projects, hand-crufts code, beats on a guitar and dreams of having time to play D and D.