Press Room

Press Release: April 15, 2009

Next Week's MySQL Conference & Expo Spotlights Obama Campaign's Web Team; Open Source's Contribution to Presidential Campaign Explored

Sebastopol, CA, April 15, 2009 -- Want to learn how open source software helped Barack Obama get elected president? Don’t miss the closing keynote at the MySQL Conference & Expo 2009, “Database We Can Believe In: Stories from the Front Lines (and Server Rooms) of Barack Obama's Online Presidential Campaign.” Co-presented by Sun Microsystems and O’Reilly Media, the seventh annual MySQL Conference & Expo explores “Innovation Everywhere” April 20-23, 2009 at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. With more than 2,000 attendees, it is the world's largest community event for open source database developers, DBAs, vendors, and corporate IT managers.

To see how the Obama Team helped change history and to participate in the world’s largest open source database event, register at:
https://en.oreilly.com/mysql2009/public/register

Barack Obama's presidential campaign created an unprecedented online grassroots movement in which supporters generated thousands of events, made millions of phone calls, raised record amounts of money, and received over a billion emails. On Thursday March 23, join us to hear how the efforts of Chuck Hagenbuch and Leigh Heyman of Blue State Digital, and Stephen Gunn, Mikey Dickerson, and Ian Gulliver of Google forever changed the way that technology is used in the election process. They will share details and their experiences leading up to Election Day, the tools that were used, and how the campaign's online efforts exceeded all expectations.

The Obama Team members brought diverse experience and skills to this historic project.

  • Mikey Dickerson has worked in the Site Reliability department at Google, where he manages one of the largest MySQL deployments in the world, since 2006.
  • Ian Gulliver has worked in the computing industry for more than ten years at telecom giants and Internet startups, including founding and implementing an anti-spam blackhole list using Sun's MySQL database that grew to be the most-queried on the Internet.
  • Steve Gunn was the Site Reliability Engineering Lead for a large MySQL installation at Google from 2005 to 2008, when he volunteered to help with big-data analytics at 'Obama For America', and has worked with networks since returning to Google.
  • Chuck Hagenbuch leads the software infrastructure team at Blue State Digital, building the core of the company's tools and working with new technologies.
  • Leigh Heyman has been the Lead System Administrator for Blue StateDigital, where he heads up the team that manages all aspects of the company's server, network and database infrastructure, since 2005.

2009 MySQL Conference & Expo Sponsors include Kickfire, Virident, Infobright, JasperSoft, Intel, AMD, BIRT Exchange by Actuate, Calpont, Continuent, Dolphin Interconnect Solutions, Facebook, HiT Software, IBM, iDashboards, InnoBase by Oracle, Pentaho, R1Soft, Schooner Information Technology, SQLstream, Ticketmaster, and Zmanda.

For more information on MySQL and the complete program:
http://www.mysqlconf.com/

If you'd like to stay up to date on information relating to MySQL Conference & Expo, sign up for the conference newsletter:
http://www.mysqlconf.com/mysql2009/public/sv/q/80

See selected presentations, videos, photos, articles, blogs, and other coverage of last year's event:
http://www.mysqlconf.com/mysql2008/public/content/news-coverage

For information about sponsorship and exhibit opportunities at MySQL Conference & Expo, contact Sharon Cordesse at 707.827.7065 or [email protected].

About Sun's MySQL Database
MySQL is the most popular open source database software in the world. Many of the world's largest and fastest-growing organizations use MySQL to save time and money powering their high-volume Web sites, critical business systems, communications networks, and commercial software. At www.mysql.com, Sun provides corporate users with commercial subscriptions and services, and actively supports the large MySQL open source developer community.

About O’Reilly

O’Reilly Media spreads the knowledge of innovators through its books, online services, magazines, and conferences. Since 1978, O’Reilly Media has been a chronicler and catalyst of cutting-edge development, homing in on the technology trends that really matter and spurring their adoption by amplifying “faint signals” from the alpha geeks who are creating the future. An active participant in the technology community, the company has a long history of advocacy, meme-making, and evangelism.

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