Baron Schwartz is a database performance and scalability expert, known online as Xaprb. He is a co-author of High Performance MySQL (see the 3rd edition) and the original author of innotop, the terminal monitor for MySQL. He also created Maatkit and Aspersa, the two toolkits that Percona forked in 2011 to become Percona Toolkit.
He joined Percona in 2008 and later founded VividCortex, a database performance monitoring company that SolarWinds acquired in 2019. He has spoken at conferences including USENIX LISA and SREcon, and has focused his career on learning and teaching about the performance and observability of systems in general, and of databases in particular.