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.

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.

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Interviews