Jim Starkey

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jim Starkey is a database architect who developed InterBase, the first relational database to support multi-versioning, the blob column type (see The true story of BLOBs), type event alerts, arrays and triggers. He founded the web application development and database tool company Netfrastructure. The [Star Online] provides a brief history of the creation of InterBase and its mutation into Firebird. It mentions only in passing his earlier work at DEC where he created DATATRIEVE, Rdb/ELN, and DSRI, the DEC Standard Relational Interface for the company's database products. (More to come).

[edit] Education and career

Born 6 January 1949 in Illinois, USA. Starkey's first major computer language was STOP, an assembler emulator written in 1965 and used by IIT for undergraduate instruction. Graduated from University of Wisconsin, in Mathematics. Worked at the Computer Corporation of America on the Data Computer and Data Language. Starkey joined Digital Equipment Corporation in 1977. He released DATATRIEVE Version 1 for the PDP-11 in 1977, VAX DATATRIEVE in 1981 as part of the VAX Information Architecture, Rdb/ELN, the Digital Standard Relational Interbase, and a variety of uncommercialized database-centric and 4GL proofs of concept. In 1984 he founded Groton Database Systems which became Interbase Software Corporation. Interbase was sold to Ashton-Tate in 1991, which in turn was sold to Borland. Borland subsequently incorporated InterBase in its Delphi product. After leaving Interbase, Starkey began a series of attempts to productize innovative database technology, including Netfrastructure which was acquired by MySQL AB. He is known fondly as "The Wolf" to Firebird SQL developers (which is an open source branch off of InterBase). He gave Firebird SQL developers little encouragement due to his dislike of open source^{[citation needed]}, stating that he indeed likes to be paid for his work, but his influence was felt just the same through his occasional nudge to get us back on the right track.

He created Falcon - a new transactional database engine for MySQL based on the Netfrastructure codebase, but left MySQL in June 2008 before Falcon finishes, see [1].

See [2] Dr. Dobb's Portal for a November 2007 interview with Starkey.