Welcome
Ronald Bradford is an industry leading expert in the open source relational database field. With 30 years of experience in large-scale data systems, Ronald specializes in implementing resilient, scalable and automated data solutions for customers. His hands-on approach transforms complex challenges into measurable business success for customers delivering results that balance performance, cost-efficiency, quality and simplicity.
As an Enterprise Data Architect, Ronald is a recognized MySQL Subject Matter Expert (SME), a published author and conference speaker. He has received numerous international industry awards in the database field. He has presented across 22 countries and authored multiple books in the Effective MySQL series.
Explore below to learn more about his published works, speaking engagements, and professional achievements.
Books
Published Titles:
- Effective MySQL: Replication Techniques in Depth
- Effective MySQL: Backup and Recovery
- Effective MySQL: Optimizing SQL Statements
- Expert PHP and MySQL
Presentations
Recent Highlights:
- 180+ presentations across 22 countries
- 2025: MySQL BR Conference, São Paulo
- 2025: MySQL Heatwave Summit, San Francisco
- Expertise in MySQL, AWS, and Cloud Computing
Awards & Recognition
Awards:
- MySQL Rockstars Hall of Fame - Legend - 2025
- Oracle MySQL ACE Director - 2010 - 2018
- MySQL Community Contributor of the Year - 2013
- MySQL Community Member of the Year - 2009
- All-time top blogger at Planet MySQL - 2011
Certifications:
- AWS Certified Database Specialty
- AWS Certified Solutions Architect
- Oracle Certified Professional, MySQL 5.6
Recent Blog Posts
VillageSQL Extensions with versioning
VillageSQL has just released it’s latest version 0.0.5 , describing this as stable release for installations with full MySQL 8.4.10 compatibility. With my primary work around extensions, specifically vsql-statistics , I took the new versioning features for a test.
Producing Two Sample T-Test statistics with SQL
The two sample t-test for equal variance is a statistical test to determine if the means of two groups are different enough that the difference is likely caused by some underlying difference, rather than random chance.
Building your first VillageSQL Extension with AI skills
This is a technical walkthrough of the vsql-extension-builder recently released May 28 at Percona Live Bay Area 2026 and found at https://github.com/villagesql/villagesql-skills . Highlights Install VillageSQL pre-built binary first Install SDK with pre-built binary second Install the skill Run it with your AI tool The output can be found at https://github.