Swathi Kurunji is a software engineer at Actian Corporation. She recently completed her PhD in computer science from the University of Massachusetts Lowell (UMass Lowell), USA. She has a keen interest in database systems. Her PhD research involved query optimization, big data analysis, data warehousing, and cloud computing. Swathi has shown excellence in her field of study through research publications at international conferences and in journals. She has received awards and scholarships from UMass Lowell for research and academics.
Swathi also has a master's of science degree in computer science from UMass Lowell and a bachelor's of engineering degree in information science from KVGCE in India. During her studies at UMass Lowell, she worked as a teaching assistant, helping professors in teaching classes and labs, designing projects, and grading exams.
She has worked as a software development intern with IT companies such as EMC and SAP. At EMC, she gained experience on Apache Cassandra data modeling and performance analysis. At SAP, she gained experience on the infrastructure/cluster management components of the Sybase IQ product. She has also worked with Wipro Technologies in India as a project engineer, managing application servers.
She has extensive experience with database systems such as Apache Cassandra, Sybase IQ, Oracle, MySQL, and MS Access. Her interests include software design and development, big data analysis, optimization of databases, and cloud computing. Her LinkedIn profile is http://www.linkedin.com/pub/swathi-kurunji/49/578/30a/.
Swathi has previously reviewed two books, Cassandra Data Modeling and Analysis and Mastering Apache Cassandra, both by Packt Publishing.
Jeff Lawson has been a user and fan of PostgreSQL since he noticed it in 2001. Over the years, he has also developed and deployed applications for IBM DB2, Oracle, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Sybase, and others, but he has always preferred PostgreSQL because of its balance of features and openness. Much of his experience has spanned development for Internet-facing websites and projects that required highly scalable databases with high availability or provisions for disaster recovery.
Jeff currently works as the director of software development at FlightAware, which is an airplane tracking website that uses PostgreSQL and other pieces of open source software to store and analyze the positions of thousands of flights that fly worldwide every day. He has extensive experience in software architecture, data security, and networking protocol design because of his roles as a software engineer at Univa/United Devices, Microsoft, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and WolfeTech. He was a founder of distributed.net, which pioneered distributed computing in the 1990s, and continues to serve as the chief of operations and a member of the board. He earned a BSc in computer science from Harvey Mudd College.
Jeff is fond of cattle, holds an FAA private pilot certificate, and owns an airplane in Houston, Texas.
Maurício Linhares is a technical leader of the parsing and machine learning team at The Neat Company. At Neat, he helps his team scale their solutions on the cloud and deliver fast results to customers. He is the creator and maintainer of async, a Scala-based PostgreSQL database driver (https://github.com/mauricio/postgresql-async), and has been a PostgreSQL user and proponent for many years.
Shaun M. Thomas has been working with PostgreSQL since late 2000. He has presented at Postgres open conferences in 2011, 2012, and 2014 on topics such as handling extreme throughput, high availability, server redundancy, failover techniques, and system monitoring. With the recent publication of Packt Publishing's PostgreSQL 9 High Availability Cookbook, he hopes to make life easier for DBAs using PostgreSQL in enterprise environments.
Currently, Shaun serves as the database architect at Peak6, an options trading firm with a PostgreSQL constellation of over 100 instances, one of which is over 15 TB in size.
He wants to prove that PostgreSQL is more than ready for major installations.
Tomas Vondra has been working with PostgreSQL since 2003, and although he had worked with various other databases—both open-source and proprietary—he instantly fell in love with PostgreSQL and the community around it.
He is currently working as an engineer at 2ndQuadrant, one of the companies that provide support, training, and other services related to PostgreSQL. Previously, he worked as a PostgreSQL specialist for GoodData, a company that operates a BI cloud platform built on PostgreSQL. He has extensive experience with performance troubleshooting, tuning, and benchmarking.
In his free time, he usually writes PostgreSQL extensions or patches, or he hacks something related to PostgreSQL.