Percona Live NYC 2011 Speakers

Eric David Benari

Chief Architect, Vork PHP Framework

Eric is the Master of Ceremonies for Percona Live NYC 2011. He is the organizer of the NYC MySQL Meetup Group, Co-Founder of PlumWillow, Founder of the IT Management Group, and Chief Architect of the Vork open-source PHP framework. Eric has 11+ years of IT experience, and has been invited to speak at many universities and conferences. He has contributed to publications such as Forbes.com and MIT CIO Corner.

Mike Benshoof

Database Administrator, ONEsite

Mike Benshoof is ONEsite's Database Administrator and is responsible for the scalability and high availability of its MySQL servers, search and daemon infrastructure. In addition to his DBA responsibilities Mike is the architect of ONEsite's DailyWorker multi-language persistent job queue system.

Ronald Bradford

MySQL Performance and Scalability Expert, Effective MySQL

Ronald has over 20 years of industry experience in relational database technologies (MySQL/Oracle/Ingres), data architecture, software development, performance analysis and production system implementations.

Espen Braekken

VP of Global Services, Percona

Espen leads Percona's consulting, training, and support practice. He has worked in the database industry for more than 20 years, managing teams at Oracle and Amadeus (e-Travel) as well as at several smaller technology companies.

Sheeri Cabral

Database Operations Manager, PalominoDB

Sheeri was the first MySQL Oracle ACE Director. She is the author of the MySQL Administrator's Bible, and the founder of the Boston MySQL User Group, Technocation, and OurSQLCast: The MySQL Database Community Podcast. She holds a master's degree in computer science specializing in databases from Brandeis University.

Darpan Dinker

Vice President of Engineering, Schooner Info. Tech.

Darpan is the driver behind Schooner's MySQL product and technology. Darpan has over 15 years of professional experience in database, middle-ware and edge software products and has held engineering leadership roles at Sun Labs, Sun Microsystems, iPlanet, Netscape, and Fujitsu.

James Dixon

Chief Geek (CTO), Pentaho

As 'Chief Geek' (CTO) at Pentaho, James Dixon is responsible for Pentaho's architecture and technology roadmap. James has over 15 years of professional experience in software architecture, development and systems consulting. Prior to Pentaho, James held key technical roles at AppSource Corporation and Keyola. Earlier in his career, James was a technology consultant working with large and small firms to deliver the benefits of innovative technology in real-world environments.

Vladimir Fedorkov

Director of Professional Services, Sphinx

In his day-to-day work Vladimir helps people to grow their websites by scaling and optimizing them and eliminating performance bottlenecks on different levels. In the past he worked with high-performance systems as a developer and team leader. Before joining Sphinx he worked at Percona.

Harrison Fisk

MySQL Database Engineer, Facebook

Harrison is a member of the Facebook database performance team. He spent over 7 years at MySQL AB and Sun Microsystems as a Trainer, Consultant, and Staff Support Engineer. He co-authored the book MySQL Clustering.

Patrick Galbraith

Senior Systems and Database Administrator, Blue Gecko

Patrick maintains DBD::mysql, DBD::drizzle, FederatedX storage engine and the Memcached Functions for MySQL. He authored 'Developing Web Applications using Perl, Memcached, MySQL, and Apache'. Patrick lives up in the sticks of New Hampshire with his wife Ruth, and for a hobby is part owner of a local wireless Internet provider, Radius North.

Matthew Graham

Software Engineer, Etsy

As a member of Etsy's Core Team, Matt is one of the engineers who put the Dev in Etsy's DevOps. This places Matt on the front lines of Etsy's migration from a massive PostgreSQL database to MySQL shards. Matt also works with the Etsy photo system which receives over 300k uploaded photos per day.

Brendan Gregg

Lead Performance Engineer, Joyent

Brendan Gregg is the lead performance engineer at Joyent, where he analyzes performance and scalability for small to large cloud computing environments. He is a co-author of 'DTrace' and 'Solaris Performance and Tools', and has developed performance related software including the DTraceToolkit and the ZFS L2ARC. Many of Brendan's DTrace scripts are shipped by default in Mac OS X.

Gennady Gurov

MySQL DBA, The Ladders

Gennady has worked in the computer industry since 1999. At Vonage, he maintained about 500 MySQL servers and a dozen EnterpriseDB servers. At TheLadders, he maintains about 30 MySQL servers and two Clustrix appliances.

Ori Herrnstadt

Co-Founder and CTO, Akiban

Ori has been involved in developing large operational database systems since his days in the Israeli Army. After experiencing common problems of large-scale operational systems in military, healthcare, enterprise ERP, CRM systems and modern web applications, he developed the Orthogonal Architecture. In 2009, he co-founded Akiban Technologies to accelerate the development of the technology.

Robert Hodges

CEO, Continuent

Robert has over 20 years of experience in database and application engineering management. Prior to Continuent, he was Senior Engineering Manager for a variety of RDBMS products at Sybase. He also held senior engineering positions at Portera and Exigen group, where he managed and operated software-as-a-service applications. Robert is the original designer of Continuent's Tungsten solution.

Chander Kant

Founder and CEO, Zmanda

Chander is a database backup expert. He has helped customers around the world tackle their toughest backup challenges. Chander is one of the architects of Zmanda Recovery Manager for MySQL product.

Raja Kapur

Director of Architecture, UrbanDaddy

Raja's expertise is in designing and implementing highly scalable high-availability MySQL solutions, as well as applications focused on reporting and data manipulation.

Torben Mathiasen

Senior Solutions Technologist, Fusion-io

Torben Mathiasen is a Senior Solutions Technologist at Fusion-io, where he spends his time tuning and evaluating software stacks for optimal performance and reliability. Prior to joining Fusion-io, he spent 11 years at Hewlett-Packard, architecting firmware for the ProLiant BladeServer portfolio. He also held a senior system architect position at Prevas, designing the next generation embedded systems for use by customers around the globe. He has made contributions to the Linux kernel in areas like ethernet, PCI-X and storage controller drivers.

Paul Mikesell

Co-Founder, CEO, and VP of Engineering, Clustrix

Prior to starting Clustrix, Paul was the founder and director of engineering at Isilon Systems, where he designed, architected, and developed all of Isilon’s scale-out NAS products while building the company to $100M. Before Isilon, Paul was the development manager for all of RealNetworks infrastructure products. Paul earned a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science from the University of Washington.

Dmitri Mikhailov

Principal Database Architect, TheLadders

Prior to TheLadders.com Dmitri worked for Fortune Global 500 companies in Europe and the United States. He worked with big data for over two decades, designing and developing efficient solutions on every major database platform. Dmitri received a Master's Degree in Computer Science from Belarussian State University of Informatics and Radioelectronics.

Baron Schwartz

Chief Performance Architect, Percona

Baron is the lead author of High Performance MySQL, and creator of Maatkit. He consults with Percona's customers, and develops tools and practices for Percona's team.

Jordan Sebastian

Member Technical Staff, Verizon

Jordan Sebastian has worked for Verizon Wireless for the past two years, designing and implementing large scale, high availability CMS solutions. His focuses are on UI design, performance, and web application security.

Shivinder Singh

Database Architect and Engineer, Verizon

Shivinder has been in the wireless industry for the past seven years. He has worked extensively in designing highly scalable and highly available multi-site applications for Tier-1 applications on technology platforms such as Oracle, Sun Directory Server, and MySQL for major wireless carriers in the US.

Monty Taylor

Core Developer, Drizzle

Monty currently works as a core developer on the Drizzle project for Rackspace. Before Drizzle he was a Senior Consultant for MySQL, Inc and then Sun Microsystems focusing on Clustering and High Availability.

Graham Toppin

VP, Engineering, Infobright

Graham drives Infobright's product-development vision and processes, including research and development and quality assurance. Graham’s specialities include business integration, computational linguistics, artificial intelligence and database design. Graham has worked in several roles, from product design and development and business process re-engineering to customer deployment and managing large scale projects and programs for Fortune 500 companies.

Vadim Tkachenko

CTO and Co-Founder, Percona

Vadim leads Percona's development group, which produces Percona Server and Percona XtraBackup. He is an expert in solid-state storage, and has helped many hardware and software providers succeed in the MySQL market.

Yves Trudeau

Principal Consultant, Percona

Yves specializes in MySQL High-Availability and scaling solutions. Prior to joining Percona in 2009, he worked as a senior consultant for MySQL AB and Sun Microsystems, assisting customers across North America with NDB Cluster and Heartbeat/DRBD technologies.

Sergei Tsarev

Co-Founder, Director of Software Engineering, Clustrix

Sergei led the Internet Operations Systems Infrastructure team at AOL, designing large-scale monitoring and configuration management systems, including the Simple Time-series Database (STDB), which stores monitoring data for all of AOL, replacing high-end database infrastructure. Sergei earned a bachelor of science degree in computer science from University of Maryland, College Park.

Kurt von Finck

Chief Community And Communications Officer, Monty Program

Kurt has been working with computers for over 25 years, and in addition to his work with Monty Program on the MariaDB project, is a system administrator for the Gnome Foundation.

Matt Yonkovit

Principal Consultant, Percona

Matt has been working with relational databases since the mid '90s as a DBA, system administrator, and all around techie. Before joining Percona, he worked at MySQL and Sun Microsystems as a Solution Architect, helping to build architectures for Fortune 500 and top Alexa-rated companies.

Peter Zaitsev

Founder and CEO, Percona

Peter managed the High Performance Group within MySQL until 2006, when he founded Percona. Peter has a Master’s Degree in Computer Science and is an expert in database kernels, computer hardware, and application scaling.

Ivan Zoratti

Director of Field Services, SkySQL

Ivan has 25 years of experience in computer science, IT, journalism, technical writing, and entrepreneurship, starting with Digital Equipment Corporation. He has worked on DW and BI since the early 90s, with DEC RDB, Informix, Oracle, SQLServer and MySQL. Ivan joined MySQL in 2005 and led the European Pre-Sales team for the Software Infrastructure Group at Sun Microsystems.