Introducing Myself: Jörg Brühe

For some time already, FromDual's "Our Team" page lists me, and it even reveals that I joined in September, 2014. Also for some time, the list of FromDual blogs contains an entry "Jörg's Blog", but it doesn't lead to any entries. It is high time to fix this and create entries, starting with an introduction of myself.

Often, in such introductions people use the phrase of "the new kid on the block". I won't. If I am to use those words, I will arrange them as "the kid on the new block". The reason is that I don't feel as a new kid in the MySQL village (or is it a city?), let alone in DBMS country.

Ever since I left university (Technical University of Berlin, Germany), I have been involved in SQL DBMS development. After my previous product's team had been dissolved in Berlin and maintenance moved to Riga, Latvia, as a cost-cutting measure, I joined MySQL AB in 2004 as a member of the Build Team. Some of you will remember my name from MySQL release announcements, others may have seen it in bug reports, newsgroup entries, or other MySQL communication. Together with the other MySQL colleagues, I got acquired by Sun in 2008 and then by Oracle in 2010.

In 2012, I decided I wanted a culture change, from a highly (and very strictly) organized corporation to a smaller, more flexible entity. That brought me to an internet site, where I worked as a DBA, concentrating on their (more than 100) MySQL installations. It was very interesting to view MySQL from the DBA side now, I got a big load of new experiences and learned a lot about using, running, and automating MySQL (rather than building and testing it).

That might have continued, but as usual the world is changing, and my DBA job was no exception: Company strategy was to shift those tasks more to the various application teams and to do without a central point for MySQL. It is a sign how far MySQL knowledge has spread, and how little effort may be sufficient to run MySQL, that this worked. OTOH, this invalidated the assumptions on which my job was based, and I did not really fit the alternatives left in that company.

In that situation, my contact to FromDual got renewed, and both the company and me felt we should be a good match. Till now, there is no indication we were wrong: I like the work, I feel I'm productive and make customers happy, the tasks are manifold and interesting (so interesting that writing the first blog gets delayed quite long), and I expect this will continue.

"Ad multos annos!"