Who We Are
Leadership Team
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Laine Campbell
Laine is the CEO and Founder of PalominoDB. She is a proven database expert with a history of scaling high-performance and high-availability web applications. For 8 years, she performed as principal DBA at Travelocity.com, working with them through the full life-cycle of a successful online web service. She leverages extensive operational experience and best practices with extensive technical knowledge, troubleshooting skills and a passion for results to ease you through the life-cycles of your company.
Jay Edwards
Jay Edwards is the CTO of PalominoDB a boutique data management consulting firm, an accomplished public speaker, and an adviser to a number of startups. His professional interest revolves around the real-time processing and display of large amounts of data. He is frequently asked by Amazon's AWS data team to speak about various options for handling data in the cloud. Later this year he will be speaking at Percona Live and O'Reilly's Velocity Conf. He consults regularly with IBM Research about how database technology is used in the field.
The first dedicated DBA at Twitter, Inc., Jay eventually became one of the founding members of Twitter's Research & Analytics team. As the Lead Database Engineer at Obama for America, Jay was instrumental in building the infrastructure that led the President's Tech team to a 2012 victory.
He is also a highly decorated US Army veteran.
Charlie Killian
Charlie is the VP Professional Services at PalominoDB. He has created the back-bone technology for multiple million dollar companies. Most recently Principal Engineer at Castfire, he helped design, develop and scale the Castfire video Content Management System that delivers over 400 TB of data monthly. Since writing his first SSI in 1998, Charlie has become an expert in web applications. He's built his own web application framework, setup and integrated numerous disparate systems, built long term client relationships, contributed to Professional PHP4 XML, and been quoted in articles in Computerworld and Dice. Key to Charlie's success has been a love of cyberspace, hardware, software, an unwavering patience and an unstoppable urge to figure out how things work.
Kevin Bowman
Kevin Bowman joins Palomino as VP Operations after gaining 18 years of diverse experience at Garmin, the leading manufacturer of navigation systems for automotive, aviation, marine, outdoor, and sports. Kevin began his career at Garmin offering desktop and network/server support, where he thrived in the fast-paced environment and was soon serving as IT Manager, supervising areas including service desk, Internet application development, systems administration, network engineering, DBA, architecture and devops. Most recently, Kevin worked with the Garmin product development teams, with a focus on delivering internet-enabled products. In this role, he contributed significantly on application and system architecture and devops for the backend systems that provide data services to Garmin products as well as for Garmin Connect. He is excited to bring his broad range of experience with high-volume data and diverse technologies to support the business goals of Palomino clients.
Team Netcat
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Ben Black
Ben is the PalominoDB Netcat Team Lead, managing our DBA group in day to day operations. For the past 10 years, Ben has been a DBA, developer, and Sys Admin working on high volume production systems at Garmin. He has been on both the development side and the admin side, and knows how to work efficiently across teams. He is an expert at writing and tuning SQL queries. He has primarily been a MySQL admin for the past 5 years. Ben is certified as a MySQL 5.0 and 5.1 administrator.
René Cannao
René has 10 years of working experience as System, Network and Database Administrator mainly on Linux/Unix platform. In the last 4 years his working experience was focused mainly on MySQL, working also as Senior MySQL Support Engineer at Sun/Oracle . In this period he build an analytic and problem solving mindset and he is always eager to take on new challenges, especially if they are related to high performance.
Mark Filipi
Mark has been an operational DBA at PalominoDB since 2011. He began working in IT in 2003 and as a DBA in 2008 at Garmin. With a background in networking and systems administration, he quickly became a primary and expert MySQL DBA. He is experienced and effective in working with remote teams and actively adapts to changing technical environments. Mark is certified as a MySQL 5.0 and 5.1 administrator.
Alkin Tezuysal
Alkin is a Senior Database Administrator at Palominodb. He has extensive experience in enterprise relational databases working in various sectors for large corporations. With more then 17 years of industry experience he has acquired skills for managing large projects from ground up to production. For the past three years he's been focusing on e-commerce sector and MySQL technologies. He managed and architected database topologies for high volume site at eBay Intl. He has several years of experience on 24X7 support and operational tasks as well as improving database systems for major companies.
Riccardo Pizzi
Bio Coming Soon
Team RSync
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Greg Olson
Greg is the PalominoDB RSync Team Lead, managing our DBA group in day to day operations. He joined the PalominoDB team in 2008 and outside of Laine, has been around the longest on staff. As a senior systems administrator at Travelocity for 9 years he developed a keen operational rapport. The ability to work safely and effectively in production is critical for our customers and Greg exemplifies this. Greg also was the fulltime systems and database administrator for Dogster for 2 years before joining us where he has continued to hone his systems and database administration skills.
David Turner
Dave has more than 10 years experience working with databases such as Oracle and MySQL. He was drawn to MySQL because of his interest in database internals and a deeper understanding of systems architecture. With MySQL he has found he has more freedom to explore. His experience in working at larger shops such as YRC (formerly Yellow Freight), Sprint, and Facebook has given him a strong understanding of scaling issues and of managing massive numbers of databases. He's looking forward to helping our clients scale and to improve the operational effectiveness of their shops.
Emanuel Calvo
Emanuel became Operational DBA at Palomino in 2011.He's focused on PostgreSQL databases and has lectured about Postgres in Argentina, Brazil and Spain. He has extensive experience in heterogenous and high load environments, complex solutions for data storing, and crossing data between several database engines and platforms. He has worked with Postgres since 6.5, as well as Oracle 8 and Mysql 5.0 versions across a wide range of client environments.
Krzysztof Książek
Krzysztof has 7 years of experience working with customers as a System Administrator and a DBA, including as a senior DBA in Kei.pl - one of the biggest hosting companies in Poland. He was responsible for daily operations, performance reviews, capacity planning, query tuning and development work on more than 1500 MySQL servers running on multiple virtual instances. Krzysztof is certified as a MySQL 5.0 administrator.
Vlad Fedorkov
Vladimir has been helping people to scale their LAMP applications for more than 10 years, with a focus on performance optimization, architectural choices and deep knowledge of search and MySQL technologies. As a team lead on the PalominoDB European team, he
provides high-profile remote DBA operational support and performance tuning on large, distributed open source database platforms. In the past he was worked with high-performance systems as a developer and team leader. He's spoken in the past at numerous OSS conferences and meet-ups in the US, EU and Russia. In his off-duty time he enjoys traveling, bicycling and photography.
Valerie Parham-Thompson
Valerie has over 12 years of experience in database development, database administration, data analysis, and web-based programming. She comes to PalominoDB from an email marketing and public relations SAAS provider, where she maintained a large-scale, highly available MySQL installation.
Professional Services Team
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Charlie Killian
Charlie is the VP Professional Services at PalominoDB. He has created the back-bone technology for multiple million dollar companies. Most recently Principal Engineer at Castfire, he helped design, develop and scale the Castfire video Content Management System that delivers over 400 TB of data monthly. Since writing his first SSI in 1998, Charlie has become an expert in web applications. He's built his own web application framework, setup and integrated numerous disparate systems, built long term client relationships, contributed to Professional PHP4 XML, and been quoted in articles in Computerworld and Dice. Key to Charlie's success has been a love of cyberspace, hardware, software, an unwavering patience and an unstoppable urge to figure out how things work.
Mike Taluc
Mike is a Senior Engineer at PalominoDB. With 17 years of DBA, application administration, and systems administration roles mixed together with a wide range of development work from data warehouses to CRM migrations to website development, he brings a breadth of expertise to projects. With a keen sensitivity to operational integrity, he is passionate about finding optimal solutions defined by the business needs.
With his technical career starting by being thrust into supporting mission critical operations at one of Bank of America's largest trading floors, Mike has been imbued with a penchant for customer service and doing whatever it takes to deliver and maintain the IT infrastructure. He rode out the dot com whirlwind in the late 90s as the principal DBA of a startup going from revenues of $50k per day to $2million per day and so has had his share of being in the hot seat. After moving to Portland in 2000, he worked as a jack of all IT for a couple small companies, providing programming and analytical skills on top of DBA work. Mike joined PalominoDB in the Fall of 2011, intrigued by the model of operational support enhanced by an engineering team and excited about the prospect of digging deeper into the NoSQL revolution. He greatly enjoys the team aspect of PalominoDB for its camaraderie as well as sharing of skills and has already learned a great deal in his work for PalominoDB clients.
Moss Gross
Moss is a Senior Engineer at PalominoDB. He has a degree in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Michigan. Moss served as a nuclear engineering officer on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln. He developed software with the teams at Preview Travel, Travelocity, Zergsoft, a software company based in Nagoya, Japan, and Dogster/SAY Media, specializing in web applications and internationalization. Fluent in Java, C++, Ruby, Perl, and Japanese, his hobbies are studying Japanese and riding motorcycles.
René Cannao
René is Palomino DB's Principal MySQL Performance Consultant. He has 10 years of working experience as System, Network and Database Administrator mainly on Linux/Unix platform. In the last 4 years his working experience was focused mainly on MySQL, working also as Senior MySQL Support Engineer at Sun/Oracle . In this period he build an analytic and problem solving mindset and he is always eager to take on new challenges, especially if they are related to high performance.
Sergei Sheinin
Sergei Sheinin is a database architect and programmer with over a decade of experience. He has designed database models for mobile text messaging platform, direct marketing agency and NGO research institute. His experience includes work for some of the world's largest financial institutions where he helped improve database performance in an equity trading platform and designed numerous ETL processes and data marts. Sergei is an architect of a large volume data warehouse and asynchronous transaction integrity solution for a cloud computing system.
Team DevOps
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Marc Mercer
Marc is the energetic joker of PalominoDB. When he's not busy making people laugh, he's quite serious about getting things done. For the past 10 hours, hes been working on your environment, and you didnt even realize it... amazing isnt it?
For the past 10+ years, Marc has endeavored to grasp all things Systems Operations. In his most recent roles, Marc has served as technical lead, influencing core network and system design enabling high availability and overall stability. Hobbies include playing (harmless) practical jokes, being an all around Gluteus Sarcastica, and spending time with his wife or playing video games and watching anime on crunchyroll/netflix or hulu.
Support Team
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Kaichi Sung
Kaichi occupies the dual role of Project Management Lead and Scrum Master at PalominoDB.
Once upon a time ago she was a molecular biologist, but found her true calling in software systems during the late 90s dot-com boom. During her 9 years in Biotech, she focused on business analysis and IT project management supporting process improvements and new product introductions into highly automated manufacturing environments. She was one of the leads in rolling out Agile Scrum for manufacturing systems development at Life Technologies and is certified as both a Scrum Master and Product Owner. A natural multitasker and planner, Kaichi is happiest coordinating projects and helping her teams deliver successfully on customer requirements.
Erin Patterson
Erin is a Project Manager and joined the PalominoDB team in March of 2011. She has a master's from Florida State University and an undergraduate degree from Berklee College. She has experience managing over 30+ clients goals, therapeutic interventions, and team meetings for companies such as Music to Grow to On, Heartland Therapy, and Tallahassee Memorial Hospital. As a Lifestyles Director for St. Anna's Residence, Erin was solely responsible for coordinating the entire community's entertainment calendar, music therapy interventions and treatment, bridges programs with local private schools, and the volunteer department. She also provided ongoing training in social media and inbound marketing strategies for the entire marketing and lifestyles/activities departments at their affiliated assisted living communities. She is an enthusiastic leader, organizer, and communicator who is happy to be a member of the Palominodb team.
Vivian Peng
Vivian is a Project Manager at PalominoDB and joined the team in October of 2012. She has managed daily operations at the Functional Genomics Laboratory serving multiple departmental needs at the University of California, Berkeley as well as various field projects that required extensive logistics and vendor management. Transferring her organizational and planning skills from the scientific arena, Vivian's focused on providing a high level of support to ensure successful projects at PalominoDB.
Bo Blaze
Bo is the PalominoDB Office Manager. He has over 20 years of experience owning, operating and managing tech companies. He was the principal at BLAZE inter.NET, a Multimedia, web site and database design and development company who worked with such varied clients as, Sharp Electronics, The United Way, Kyocera Mita, Time Warner Interactive, Byron Preiss Multimedia, Sabrett Hotdogs and many more.
Celeste DeVaneaux
Celeste DeVaneaux has a background in Information Technology, Process Re-engineering, and Organizational Psychology. She has worked for the US Department of Veteran Affairs Health Care System and the US Department of Treasury, where she managed an international account that processed 30M payments totaling $50B per year. She then established a Project Management Office before moving into Director-level IT position for Club One Fitness – a $75M privately-held company with 2,700 employees. She has received multiple awards for her designs in training and education, virtual worksites, commercialization, and market-share expansion. Her work is published by a number of technical and psychological entities including Psychology Today, The Journal of Medical Internet Research, and Hawaiian International Conference on Systems Science. She lectures and is an industry partner at major universities on Virtual Environments.
In her free time, Celeste is a Hospice volunteer, studies piano, and plays with her 6.5lb Yorkshire Terrier.