Interviews

Behind the software of MySQL are of course the people. The MySQL developers, and the many other colleagues around them, are the ones who are making it all happen: new features, bug fixes, support, etc. Some of you may have met a few of them already, either at a previous conference, user group meeting, or another occasion. In this series, you will meet some of these people.

What's New in the MySQL Enterprise Fall 2009 Release? - Interview with Mark Matthews and Andy Bang

By Mark Matthews and Andy Bang, | September 8, 2009

We talked to Mark Matthews and Andy Bang, two core developers in the MySQL Enterprise Monitor team, to give us some insight into the new features in the latest MySQL Enterprise Release. You can find more about the MySQL Query Analyzer in our previous interview with Mark Matthews.

Allan Packer on performance tuning: Scaling MySQL

By Lenz Grimmer | January 22, 2009

A year ago this past week (on January 16, 2008), Sun Microsystems announced a historic deal to acquire MySQL AB for a billion dollars. Since then, MySQL-ers (aka Sun Dolphins) have settled in with Sun folks. While Sun has had an influence on MySQL, MySQL has also had an influence on several projects within "Sun Classic". Over this week, we hope to explore some of the projects around Sun which use MySQL and how the acquisition has helped bring us all closer together. Today we talk to Allan Packer, Principal Engineer in the Performance Technologies group at Sun Microsystems and team lead for the MySQL Performance & Scalability Project.

Neelakanth Nadgir on MySQL and ZFS: A File System Revolution

By Duleepa "Dups" Wijayawardhana | January 21, 2009

A year ago this past week (on January 16, 2008), Sun Microsystems announced a historic deal to acquire MySQL AB for a billion dollars. Since then, MySQL-ers (aka Sun Dolphins) have settled in with Sun folks. While Sun has had an influence on MySQL, MySQL has also had an influence on several projects within "Sun Classic". Over this week, we hope to explore some of the projects around Sun which use MySQL and how the acquisition has helped bring us all closer together. Today we talk to Neelakanth Nadgir in the Sun/MySQL Performance Team about MySQL and ZFS, the revolutionary file system included with Solaris and OpenSolaris operating systems from Sun.

Detlef Ulherr and Thorsten Früauf on Open HA Cluster: Making MySQL highly available on Solaris

By Lenz Grimmer | January 20, 2009

A year ago this past week (on January 16, 2008), Sun Microsystems announced a historic deal to acquire MySQL AB for a billion dollars. Since then, MySQL-ers (aka Sun Dolphins) have settled in with Sun folks. While Sun has had an influence on MySQL, MySQL has also had an influence on several projects within "Sun Classic". Over this week, we hope to explore some of the projects around Sun which use MySQL and how the acquisition has helped bring us all closer together. Today we talk to Detlef Ulherr and Thorsten Fruehauf, engineers working on Solaris Cluster and its Open Source sibling, Open HA Cluster.

Vince Carbone on MySQL and DTrace: Dynamically tracing better performance

By Duleepa "Dups" Wijayawardhana | January 19, 2009

A year ago this past week (on January 16, 2008), Sun Microsystems announced a historic deal to acquire MySQL AB for a billion dollars. Since then, MySQL-ers (aka Sun Dolphins) have settled in with Sun folks. While Sun has had an influence on MySQL, MySQL has also had an influence on several projects within "Sun Classic". Over this week, we hope to explore some of the projects around Sun which use MySQL and how the acquisition has helped bring us all closer together. Today we talk to Vince Carbone in Sun's Performance Technology Group about MySQL with DTrace, the dynamic tracing application that is part of Solaris and OpenSolaris and set to be a hot topic at the 2009 MySQL User Conference.

Interview with Lars Heill, Release Engineering Manager

By Lenz Grimmer | Dec 2008

Born in Northern Norway 41 years ago and Lars has lived in Trondheim for the last 22 years. He is a Physicist by education, has a master degree on semiconductor heterojunctures and has earned a PhD on high temperature superconductors. He worked briefly on nuclear power fuel optimization and petroleum related rock mechanics before joining Clustra in the year 2000, which was acquired by Sun Microsystems in 2002. Clustra was a database software vendor that specialized in clustered, high-availability databases that were required by telecoms and service providers.

Interview with Masood Mortazavi, MySQL Engineering Manager at Sun

By Lenz Grimmer | Dec 2008

Masood Mortazavi is an Engineering Manager at the Sun Database Group. After the acquisition of MySQL, and along with the rest of Sun's original database technology group, he joined the MySQL organization to form the larger Sun Database Group. In this interview, Masood talks with Lenz about the flexibility and diversity of Sun as a workplace, his life prior to joining Sun and his current assignment to improve the MySQL code contribution process.

Interview with Stewart Smith, Drizzle/MySQL Cluster

By Duleepa "Dups" Wijayawardhana | Dec 2008

Stewart Smith, a former member of the MySQL Cluster team recently decided to move on and work as a programmer on the Drizzle project. We wanted to catch up with Stewart on both MySQL Cluster on Windows and what he's up to now.

Interview with Alexander "Salle" Keremidarski, 2008

By Duleepa "Dups" Wijayawardhana | Dec 2008

Alexander "Salle" Keremidarski works as the Manager of EMEA Support for MySQL and is one of MySQL's longest serving employees. This isn't Salle's first interview on the Devzone, but seeing as how it's been a couple of years, we thought we'd catch up with Salle and see how things are going.

Interview with Ignacio "Iggy" Galarza, Jr., developer at the MySQL Connectors team

By Lenz Grimmer | Dec 2008

Ignacio "Iggy" Galarza, Jr. is a developer at the MySQL Connectors Team. Lenz talked with him about working for a distributed company, a team with the interesting acronym "WTF" and other nerdy things.

MySQL Query Analyzer: Interview with Mark Matthews

Nov 2008

MySQL Performance Tuning is always a popular topic for DBAs and Developers. Traditionally, database tuning has required manual effort and custom scripts. MySQL Query Analyzer aims to minimize the manual effort, with easy-to-use tools to help find-n-fix problem queries. In this interview, we talk with Mark Matthews, to get an architects view of the product.

Interview with Adam Donnison, web developer at MySQL.com

By Lenz Grimmer | Nov 2008

Adam has been in IT now for more than a quarter of a century, variously as a programmer, systems analyst, database admin and consultant. The first job Adam had was writing software for cash registers in assembler, and back end software in C and COBOL on UNIX. Adam is active in a number of open source projects and is the admin of dotProject. He now works in the web team which is responsible for maintaining the mysql.com web sites.

MySQL talks with Juha Heinänen

By MySQL Telecom Team (MySQL in Communications Blog) | May 2008

During 2008 we are planning to run a series of interviews with interesting persons somehow related to the telecom field. In this first installment, we will have a chat with Juha Heinänen from Finland.

David Axmark

By Lenz Grimmer | July 2007

David Axmark co-founded MySQL AB together with Michael "Monty" Widenius and Allan Larsson in 1995. Today, he is a member of the MySQL Community Relations team and has an advisory role in the MySQL Management. He travels all across the globe to advocate for MySQL and Open Source Software in general and has just recently moved from Uppsala, Sweden to Ascot in the United Kingdom, where he lives with his wife and two children.

Jan Kneschke

By Lenz Grimmer | May 2007

Jan Kneschke is a developer in the team that develops the MySQL Enterprise Tools, where he currently works on the agent for the MySQL Network and Advisory Service. In his spare time, he hacks on lighttpd, a very popular web server.

Andrey Hristov

By Lenz Grimmer | January 2007

Andrey Hristov is a developer at MySQL AB and the author of the Event Scheduler feature that will be part of MySQL 5.1.

Monty

By Zack Urlocker | May 2006

This interview took place with Monty Widenius, co-founder of MySQL, at his house outside of Helsinki, Finland. In Monty's usual understated Finnish style, we talked about MySQL 5.0, coding styles and cooking.

Mike Zinner

By Arjen Lentz | October 2005

Mike Zinner leads the MySQL GUI development team, who are currently focusing on MySQL Workbench, a tool to visually design and view database schemas - the successor to Mike's own very successful DBDesigner4.

Dean Ellis

By Arjen Lentz | June 2005

Dean Ellis is a Senior Support Engineer and Support Group Manager at MySQL AB. We first spotted Dean in the #mysql channel on the Freenode IRC network, assisting many other users with his expertise.

João Prado Maia

By Arjen Lentz | June 2005

João Prado Maia is a Senior Software Engineer for the Internal IT department of MySQL AB. We were lucky to catch him in the wild a few years ago with his project Eventum, which we will talk about more also.

Timour Katchaounov

By Arjen Lentz | March 2005

Timour Katchaounov is a member of the MySQL Optimizer group. From my own experience, this means that the only people who understand what he does will be the other members of the group (and of course, Monty). I sometimes ask Timour when I hack around a bit in the server source - he knows stuff. But in a nutshell, his group makes MySQL faster.

Oleksandr "Sanja" Byelkin

By Arjen Lentz | January 2005

For my first interview I chose Oleksandr "Sanja" Byelkin, who has played a key role in the development of some very important MySQL features in the last few years.

Reggie Burnett

By Arjen Lentz | January 2005

The "Connectors team" is an important group among the MySQL developers, as good client APIs are of course vital when using MySQL. One of the most recent additions is Connector/Net for .NET applications, and in this interview we talk with the author of this connector, Reggie Burnett.

Alexander "Salle" Keremidarski

By Arjen Lentz | January 2005

Alexander "Salle" Keremidarski is one of MySQL's Support Engineers and Support Group Manager.

Lenz Grimmer

By Arjen Lentz | January 2005

Lenz Grimmer (yes, jokes have been made about the similarity of Lenz' first name with my last name) is my first non-developer interview. However, he does play a very important role within software engineering at MySQL AB, as you will see!

Sergei Golubchik

By Arjen Lentz | January 2005

Sergei Golubchik is one of the "old hands", one of the first ten with the company.

Guilhem Bichot

By Arjen Lentz | January 2005

Guilhem Bichot is our resident expert on MySQL replication. After taking over the baton from Sasha Pachev who did the original implementation, he has been busy enhancing and extending this popular MySQL feature.

Catching up with Monty

August 2004

Michael "Monty" Widenius is the CTO and co-founder of MySQL AB, and the original developer of much of the MySQL code base. Before Monty went into hiding to dive into work on new features for MySQL 5.0 (and spend time with his newborn daughter), we caught up with him on MySQL 4.1 and the state of the company from his point of view.