Daniel Nichter is a DBA and software engineer who started optimizing MySQL performance in 2004 and soon created hackmysql.com to share information and tools about MySQL. He spent eight years at Percona working on Percona Toolkit, and worked on Percona Monitoring and Management during his final year there. His earlier tools, among them mysqlreport, mysqlsla, and mysqlsniffer, were for several years a de facto standard. The O’Reilly author note also lists him as a MySQL Community Award winner and conference speaker.
He is the author of Efficient MySQL Performance (O’Reilly, 2021), written for software engineers who use MySQL rather than for DBAs, and of Finch, an open source MySQL benchmarking tool. According to his site, he spent nine years at Block (formerly Square), where he was a principal engineer, and left in 2025.
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