About the Authors

Daniel Schneller works as a software developer, database administrator, and general IT professional for an independent software vendor in the retail sector. After successfully graduating from the University of Cooperative Education in Heidenheim, Germany with a degree in Business Computer Science, he started his career as a professional software developer, focused on the Microsoft technology stack. In 2002, he started focusing on enterprise-level Java development and has since gained extensive knowledge and experience implementing large scale systems based on Java EE and relational databases, especially MySQL since version 4.0.

Currently, he is mostly involved with the ongoing development of framework-level functionality, including customization and extension of an ORM-based persistence layer. He is involved in different open source projects such as FindBugs, Eclipse, and Checkstyle, and infrequently blogs about Java, MySQL, Windows, Linux, and other insanities at http://www.danielschneller.com.

Udo Schwedt has over ten years of experience in the IT industry as a professional Java developer and software architect. He is head of the Java architecture team and deputy head of the Java development department at the IT service provider for Germany's market leader in the Do-It-Yourself sector.

He has been fascinated by computers since his childhood, and taught himself the basics of programming during his school years. After graduating from school, he began his studies at the RWTH Aachen, Germany, which he finished with a summa cum laude degree in computer science, minoring in psychology with a focus on software ergonomics.

Udo started his career as a professional C, C++, and Java developer in a software company that delivers leading solutions in the financial online transaction processing sector. In 2003, he joined his current employer as a Java framework developer for a large-scale international project, where he met Daniel. In the course of the project, he gained extensive experience in using MySQL in a professional context.

For both Daniel and Udo, the common project involved the design and implementation of a database infrastructure solution for a Java-based merchandise management software system with tens of thousands of clients. The evaluation of different database systems and the realization of the infrastructure made it necessary for them to delve into MySQL beyond the typical utilization scenarios. The resulting decentralized multi-platform environment based on more than 500 decentralized MySQL server instances with more than 5,500 replication slaves bears challenges not covered by the standard MySQL documentation.