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 Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) where he created DATATRIEVE, Rdb/ELN, and DSRI, the Digital Standard Relational Interface for the company's database products. (More to come).
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 Interface, 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 from InterBase v6.0).
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]. Starkey has stated[2] he was moving on to NuoDB, Inc a new startup company rethinking of database technology to run in clouds.
See [3] Dr. Dobb's Portal for a November 2007 interview with Starkey.
Another [4] Interview with Jim Starkey was done in 2003 from InterBase World website
The History of the Blob and Interbase is on this [5] page in the History section of Ibphoenix website