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/.

A former manager of the High Performace Group at MySQL AB, Peter Zaitsev 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 Tkachenko 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 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 (http://openquery.com.au), 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's weblog is at http://arjen-lentz.livejournal.com/

Derek J. Balling 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 has also written
articles for The Perl Journal and a number of online magazines, and is
on the Program Committee for the 2008 LISA Conference. 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/.