The MySQL Rockstars 2024 award ceremony was a highlight of the MySQL Belgian Days 2025, held on January 30th and 31st at the ICAB Incubator in Brussels. This event brought together MySQL enthusiasts from around the globe to celebrate MySQL's 30th anniversary and honor individuals who have made significant contributions to the MySQL community.

The two-day conference featured a diverse lineup of sessions. Read the recap of these two days.

The culmination of the event was the MySQL Rockstars 2024 award ceremony. This accolade recognizes individuals who have demonstrated exceptional dedication and impact within the MySQL ecosystem. The award is a lifetime honor, distinguishing those whose names resonate within the Community as synonymous with MySQL excellence.

And here are the winners of this exceptional edition:

Laurynas Biveinis

Laurynas Biveinis is a notable figure in the MySQL ecosystem. He is mainly known for his contributions to performance optimization, bug fixing, and codebase improvements.

Laurynas is one of the most prolific contributors of MySQL (84 contributions in 8.0).

He is recognized for his in-depth technical expertise, particularly in areas related to storage engines, especially InnoDB and MyRocks.

He's also the author of a MySQL development post series: https://of-code.blogspot.com/

René Cannaò

René Cannaò is a well-known figure in the MySQL ecosystem, mainly known as the author of ProxySQL that he founded in 2016 after developing it since 2013. 

He has over 15 years of experience as Database Administrator mostly on MySQL, working as Senior MySQL Support Engineer at Sun/Oracle, Senior Operational DBA at Blackbird, and consulting for small and large companies like Dropbox. 

He's a very active Community member, always willing to help others and share his knowledge on Slack and social media.

René has been presenting at many MySQL events, including Percona Live, OpenWorld, FOSDEM, and MySQL Days.

Sinisa Milivojevic

Sinisa was employee #2 in MySQL AB and continues working at MySQL Support in Oracle.

His knowledge and passion for fighting for MySQL quality are exceptional.

Valerii Kravchuk wrote the following line about Sinisa in his blog:
"He was one of MySQL people who influenced me a lot, and I tried to play "better Sinisa" for a couple of years at my current job."

His influence on MySQL is invaluable.

He worked on countless bugs and helped many customers solve their issues with the same rigor and passion.

Jean-François Gagné

JFG constantly publishes technical blog posts for the MySQL
community. He has been active in the Community and has attended
events like FOSDEM and Percona Live for years.

He has been very active in bugs and regressions for MySQL's benefit.

Jean-François also maintains the https://planet.oursqlcommunity.org/

He recently submitted contributions to MySQL, too (#106645, #115988)

JFG is a respected database engineer and expert in high-availability systems, MySQL, and
large-scale database infrastructure.

Matt Lord

Matt Lord is a well-regarded expert in database technologies. He is primarily known for his work with MySQL and his involvement in the broader database community.
He has contributed to various database designs, optimizations, and implementations, frequently sharing insights and best practices with developers and database administrators.

Matt's a hidden hero in the MySQL ecosystem, where he played a critical role as Product Manager.

With his vast experience and knowledge, he's been educating, informative, and helpful to all community members.

Shlomi Noach - Legend

Shlomi Noach is a prominent figure in the open-source database community.

He is best known for his work on MySQL and specifically for creating and maintaining Orchestrator, a MySQL high-availability and replication management tool.

Schlomi also worked on GH-OST.

Shlomi often shares his knowledge through blog posts, outstanding presentations, and collaborations with other database professionals, focusing on database reliability, scalability, and automation.]

He has extensive database infrastructure experience and contributed to various MySQL and open-source projects.

This highly respected figure in the MySQL Community was already considered a legend by his peers even before receiving the award!

Congratulations again to all our new Rockstars!