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Advisory Board

A sage once observed that "not all of the really smart people in the world can ever work for you," and that's definitely true of Schooner. We have a world-class team, and we learn a lot from our customers and their demanding workloads and production environments. We also have a roster of industry experts, including some of the leading authorities in databases and caching, who serve as formal advisors to Schooner.

Brian Aker, Open-Source Hacker

Brian Aker is a self-proclaimed open-source hacker who has made immense contributions to a wide range of projects including various Apache modules, the Slash system, and numerous storage engines for the MySQL database. Brian was Director of Architecture at MySQL AB until it was acquired by Sun Microsystems. He later worked in Sun's research group on the Drizzle database project. Brian is now an industry consultant after Sun's acquisition by Oracle Corporation in 2010.

Rick Cattell, Database Expert

Dr. R. G. G. "Rick" Cattell is an independent consultant in database systems and in engineering management. He previously worked as a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems, most recently on open-source database systems and proprietary innovations in database systems. Dr. Cattell served for 20+ years at Sun Microsystems in management and senior technical roles, and for 10+ years in research at Xerox PARC and at Carnegie-Mellon University. Dr. Cattell is best known for his contributions to middleware and database systems — particularly enterprise Java, object-oriented databases, object/relational mappings, and database interfaces. He is the author of several dozen papers and six books. He instigated Java DB and Java 2 Enterprise Edition, and was a contributor to a number of Enterprise Java APIs and products. He previously led development of the Cedar DBMS at Xerox PARC, the Sun Simplify database GUI, and SunSoft's ORB-database integration. He was a founder of SQL Access (a predecessor to ODBC), the founder and chair of the Object Data Management Group (ODMG), the co-creator of JDBC, the author of the world's first monograph on object/relational and object databases, and a recipient of the ACM Outstanding PhD Dissertation Award.

Tom McWilliams, Cofounder and Schooner Fellow

Dr. Tom McWilliams is a cofounder of Schooner. He previously founded Pathscale, which developed a low-latency high-bandwidth InfiniBand system interconnect, and was acquired by QLogic in 2006. From 1996 to 2001 Tom was a distinguished engineer and principal investigator at Sun Microsystems, working on server architecture and advanced CAD tools. From 1993 to 1996, he managed microprocessor development and the MIPS architecture group at Silicon Graphics. In 1987, Tom founded Key Computer Laboratories, which designed one of the first superscalar pipelined computers. Key was acquired by Amdahl, where Tom served as VP in the systems architecture group until 1992. In 1981, Tom cofounded Valid Logic Systems, whose products were based around his Stanford Ph.D. work, and remained there as VP until 1989. He won the 1984 IEEE McDowell Award for creating the SCALD design methodology, the basis for many of the computer-aided engineering systems used today. Prior to Valid, he designed supercomputers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Peter Zaitsev, MySQL Expert and Cofounder of Percona

Peter Zaitsev is a world famous expert in MySQL performance optimization and scaling and one of Percona's founders. Peter has helped many companies ranging from one-man startups to Fortune 500 companies with their performance and scaling problems in various stages from architecture design to queries and schema optimization. Peter has spoken at many international conferences focused on MySQL, Open Source, databases, and high-performance Web applications. Before cofounding Percona Peter worked for MySQL AB as head of the High Performance Group. He was involved in support, consulting, development, and working with vendors helping to optimize their software and/or hardware to perform well with MySQL. Peter was also involved in a number of Web startups in roles ranging from CTO to consultant, and has a lot of experience in MySQL and Web applications, operations, deployment, quality assurance, and development.