About the Reviewers

Stephen Frost is a major contributor and committer to PostgreSQL, who has been involved with PostgreSQL since 2002, and has developed features such as the role system and column-level privileges.

He is the chief technology officer at Crunchy Data Solutions, Inc., the PostgreSQL company for Secure Enterprises. He is involved in the advancement of PostgreSQL's capabilities, particularly in the area of security in order to support the needs of government and financial institutions who have strict security and regulatory requirements.

Rick van Hattem is an entrepreneur with a computer science background and a long-time open source developer with vast experience in the C, C++, Python, and Java languages. Additionally, he has worked with most large database servers such as Oracle, MS SQL, and MySQL, but he has been focusing on PostgreSQL since Version 7.4.

He is one of the founders of the Fashiolista.com social network, and until recently, he was the CTO. Here, he used PostgreSQL to scale the feeds for millions of users to show that PostgreSQL can hold up to NoSQL solutions, given some tuning and additional tools. After Fashiolista, he worked as a freelance consultant for several companies, including 2ndQuadrant.

He is currently the founder of PGMon.com, a monitoring service that analyzes your databases, indexes, and queries to keep them running at peak performance. In addition to analyzing your database settings, the system actively monitors your queries and gives you recommendations to enhance performance.

He is also the creator and maintainer of a large number of open source projects, such as pg_query_analyser, pg_cascade_timestamp, QtQuery, Python-Statsd, and Django-Statsd.

Vibhor Kumar is a principal system architect at EnterpriseDB who specializes in assisting Fortune 100 companies to deploy, manage, and optimize Postgres databases. He joined EnterpriseDB in 2008 to work with Postgres after several years of working with Oracle systems. He has worked in team leadership roles at IBM Global Services and BMC Software as well as an Oracle database administrator at CMC Ltd. for several years. He has developed expertise in Oracle, DB2, and MongoDB and holds certifications in them. He has experience working with MS SQL Server, MySQL, and data warehousing. He holds a bachelor's degree in computer science from the University of Lucknow and a master's degree in computer science from the Army Institute of Management, Kolkata. He is a certified PostgreSQL trainer and holds a professional certification in Postgres Plus Advanced Server from EnterpriseDB.

Jeff Lawson has been a fan and user of PostgreSQL since the time he discovered 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 always prefers PostgreSQL for its balance of features and openness. Much of his experience involves developing for Internet-facing websites/projects that require highly scalable databases with high availability or with provisions for disaster recovery.

He currently works as the director of software development for FlightAware, which is an airplane-tracking website that uses PostgreSQL and other open source software to store and analyze the positions of the thousands of flights that are operated worldwide every day. He has extensive experience in software architecture, data security, and network protocol design from the software engineering positions he has held at Univa / United Devices, Microsoft, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and WolfeTech. He is a founder of distributed.net, which pioneered distributed computing in the 1990s, and he continues to serve as the chief of operations and as a member of the board there. He earned a BSc degree in computer science from Harvey Mudd College.

He is fond of cattle, holds an FAA private pilot certificate, and owns an airplane based in Houston, Texas.

Mariano Reingart lives in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and is a specialist in the software development of applications and libraries (web services, PDF, GUI, replication, and so on) with more than 10 years of experience. Currently, he is the PostgreSQL regional contact for Argentina and a Python Software Foundation member.

He is a major contributor to the web2py Python web framework, and now he's working on the wxWidgets multiplatform GUI toolkit (specifically in the Qt port and Android mobile areas). Also, he has contributed to more than a dozen open source projects, including an interface for Free Electronic Invoice web services (PyAfipWs) and Pythonic replication for PostgreSQL (PyReplica).

He has a bachelor's degree in computer systems analysis, and currently, he's a master's candidate for the MSc in free software degree at the Open University of Catalonia.

He works on his own funded entrepreneurial venture formed by an open group of independent professionals, dedicated to software development, training, and technical support, focusing on open source tools (GNU/Linux, Python, PostgreSQL, and web2py/wxPython).

He has worked for local Python-based companies in large business applications (ERP, SCM, and CRM) and mission critical systems (election counting, electronic voting, and 911 emergency events support). He has contributed to books such as web2py Enterprise Web Framework, Third Edition, and web2py Application Development Cookbook, Packt Publishing, and several Spanish translations of the PostgreSQL official documentation.

His full resume is available at http://reingart.blogspot.com/p/resume.html.

Julien Tachoires is a PostgreSQL specialist, who works as consultant for the French PostgreSQL company Dalibo. He is the main developer of pg_activity, a top-end software dedicated to follow the PostgreSQL incoming traffic in real time, which is written in Python.