Ibrar Ahmed is a Senior Database System Architect in an Enterprise PostgreSQL company. Prior to coming to open source development, he had experience in software and embedded system development. He also possesses vast experience in open source development. He has contributed to the PostgreSQL community as well as other open source communities, such as the Google Chromium project. He is an open source evangelist, and his passion for open source development has enabled him to contribute a number of significant features to different open source communities.
Ibrar has contributed significantly to the goal of making PostgreSQL a federated RDBMS. He has developed, and maintains, a number of PostgreSQL extensions that communicate with other RDBMS's, such as MySQL; NoSQL databases, such as MongoDB; and parallel file system storage, such as HDFS. He has authored another book, PostgreSQL Developer's Guide, for Packt Publishing.
Gregory Smith is a Chief PostgreSQL Evangelist in Charleston, South Carolina, for Crunchy Data Solutions, Inc. He's been providing database advice to clients in industries such as manufacturing, finance, and web development for 20 years.
Writing about PostgreSQL represents his second foray into teaching database performance tuning. He wrote a small free e-book titled, Progress Performance FAQ in 1995, covering the basics of how to make the Progress 4GL and its associated database run faster. In 2001, he converted exclusively to using PostgreSQL 7.0 for projects, and has been watching the complexity of problems the database is capable of solving increase with every release ever since.
Greg has contributed feature additions to every PostgreSQL version since 8.3. He's also the creator of a growing set of add-on tools for the database, currently including pgtune, pgbench-tools, peg, and 2warm.