Brian Aker, born August 4, 1972, in Lexington,

Kentucky Kentucky (, ), officially the Commonwealth of Kentucky, is a landlocked U.S. state, state in the Southeastern United States, Southeastern region of the United States. It borders Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio to the north, West Virginia to the ...

, US, is an

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

hacker A hacker is a person skilled in information technology who achieves goals and solves problems by non-standard means. The term has become associated in popular culture with a security hackersomeone with knowledge of bug (computing), bugs or exp ...

who has worked on various

Apache The Apache ( ) are several Southern Athabaskan language-speaking peoples of the Southwestern United States, Southwest, the Southern Plains and Northern Mexico. They are linguistically related to the Navajo. They migrated from the Athabascan ho ...

modules, the

Slash Slash may refer to: * Slash (punctuation), the "/" character Arts and entertainment Fictional characters * Slash (Marvel Comics) * Slash (''Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles'') Music * Harry Slash & The Slashtones, an American rock band * Nash th ...

system, and numerous storage engines for the

MySQL MySQL () is an Open-source software, open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). Its name is a combination of "My", the name of co-founder Michael Widenius's daughter My, and "SQL", the acronym for Structured Query Language. A rel ...

database. Aker was Director of Architecture at

MySQL AB MySQL AB was a Swedish software company founded in 1995. It was acquired by Sun Microsystems in 2008, Sun was in turn acquired by Oracle Corporation in 2010. MySQL AB is the creator of MySQL, a relational database management system, as well a ...

until it was acquired by

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc., often known as Sun for short, was an American technology company that existed from 1982 to 2010 which developed and sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services. Sun contributed sig ...

. He led Sun's web scaling research group, where he worked on the Drizzle database project. He later became a Distinguished Engineer for Sun Microsystems. After leaving Sun when Oracle acquired it, he became the CTO of Data Differential and provided support to open source projects such as libmemcached,

Gearman Gearman is an open-source application framework designed to distribute appropriate computer tasks to multiple computers, so large tasks can be done more quickly. In some cases, load balancing rather than raw speed may be the main goal; a Web serv ...

and the Drizzle database project. Aker is currently a Fellow and VP at

Hewlett Packard Enterprise The Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company (HPE) is an American multinational information technology company based in Spring, Texas. It is a business-focused organization which works in servers, storage, networking, containerization software and ...

. After graduating with triple majors in environmental science, computing and mathematics, from

Antioch College Antioch College is a Private college, private Liberal arts colleges in the United States, liberal arts college in Yellow Springs, Ohio, United States. It was founded in 1850 by the Christian Connection and began operating in 1852 as a non-secta ...

, Aker contributed to his first open source project, the

386BSD 386BSD (also known as "Jolix") is a Unix-like operating system that was developed by couple Lynne and William "Bill" Jolitz. Released as free and open source in 1992, it was the first fully operational Unix built to run on IBM PC-compatible s ...

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

. He then moved to work on

Slashdot ''Slashdot'' (sometimes abbreviated as ''/.'') is a social news website that originally billed itself as "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters". It features news stories on science, technology, and politics that are submitted and evaluated by site ...

, where his initial task was to rewrite the database back-end to use

Oracle An oracle is a person or thing considered to provide insight, wise counsel or prophetic predictions, most notably including precognition of the future, inspired by deities. If done through occultic means, it is a form of divination. Descript ...

. However, he extended the system to ensure it allowed multiple database back-ends, and became a published author along the way, writing ''Running Weblogs with Slash'' () with

chromatic Diatonic and chromatic are terms in music theory that are used to characterize scales. The terms are also applied to musical instruments, intervals, chords, notes, musical styles, and kinds of harmony. They are very often used as a pair, es ...

and Dave Krieger. From 2001 to 2007 he posted stories on Slashdot under the Author name of "Krow". Aker first involved himself with the MySQL project in 1998. In 2001 he released an early prototype of MySQL with Perl-based functions and later went from VA Linux Systems to MySQL to lead development of the 4.1 and 5.0 versions of the MySQL Database Server. He has presented projects integrating MySQL with a number of technologies, including a working version of MySQL with Java-based functions with Eric Herman in 2004 Aker has been known to offer a

Perl Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Though Perl is not officially an acronym, there are various backronyms in use, including "Practical Extraction and Reporting Language". Perl was developed ...

Certification Course at the University of Washington. He has also worked on th
Virtual Hospital
project, providing the Internet's first medical website, while at the University of Iowa Hospital and Clinics. While not traveling and presenting at about six open source related conferences a year, he resides in

Seattle Seattle ( ) is the most populous city in the U.S. state of Washington and in the Pacific Northwest region of North America. With a population of 780,995 in 2024, it is the 18th-most populous city in the United States. The city is the cou ...

, Washington. Some of the conferences Aker has presented at are OSCON, LinuxFest Northwest, Southern California Linux Expo, and the MySQL Users Conference & Expo. He is also the maintainer of the C client library for the

Memcached Memcached (pronounced variously /mɛmkæʃˈdiː/ ''mem-cash-dee'' or /ˈmɛmkæʃt/ ''mem-cashed'') is a general-purpose distributed memory-caching system. It is often used to speed up dynamic database-driven websites by caching data and object ...

server. He also maintains the current version of

. He is a commentator on the prolific creation of

NoSQL NoSQL (originally meaning "Not only SQL" or "non-relational") refers to a type of database design that stores and retrieves data differently from the traditional table-based structure of relational databases. Unlike relational databases, which ...

databases giving Ignite talks on its evolution. A list of

projects Brian Aker has created: * The Drizzle Database server * MySQL Archive Storage Engine * MySQL Federated Storage Engine * Memcached Storage Engine * CSV Storage Engine * Blackhole Storage Engine * WebMethods (HTTP) Storage Engine

References

External links

*
Portrait: Brian Aker, database strategistSlashdot Interview with Brian AkerBrian Aker's BlogInterview with Brian Aker on how to get a job as an open source developerPublic Open Source Software RepositoryInterview with Brian Aker
on

FLOSS Weekly Leo Laporte (; born November 29, 1956) is the former host of '' The Tech Guy'' weekly radio show and founder of TWiT.tv, an Internet podcast network focusing on technology. He is also a former TechTV technology host (1998–2008) and a technology ...

{{DEFAULTSORT:Aker, Brian Living people People from Lexington, Kentucky Antioch College alumni 1972 births Geeknet Sun Microsystems people Hewlett-Packard people