Jim Starkey (born January 6, 1949, in
Illinois
Illinois ( ) is a U.S. state, state in the Midwestern United States, Midwestern United States. It borders on Lake Michigan to its northeast, the Mississippi River to its west, and the Wabash River, Wabash and Ohio River, Ohio rivers to its ...
) is a database architect responsible for developing
InterBase
InterBase is a relational database management system (RDBMS) currently developed and marketed by Embarcadero Technologies. It runs on the operating systems Microsoft Windows, macOS, Linux, Oracle Solaris, Solaris, Android (operating system), Andr ...
, the first relational database to support
multi-versioning,
[Babcock, Charles]
"MySQL Database to Get Replication Monitoring, Multiversioning Concurrency Features."
InformationWeek. Sept. 14, 2007. Accessed Dec. 7, 2012 the blob column type, type event alerts, arrays and
triggers.
[Niccolai, James]
"Update: MySQL buys company, hires noted architect."
Computer World. Feb. 27, 2006. Accessed Dec. 7, 2012 Starkey is the founder of several companies, including the web application development and database tool company
Netfrastructure and
NuoDB.
Education and career
Jim Starkey graduated from
University of Wisconsin
A university () is an institution of tertiary education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. ''University'' is derived from the Latin phrase , which roughly means "community of teachers and scholars". Uni ...
at
Madison,
Wisconsin
Wisconsin ( ) is a U.S. state, state in the Great Lakes region, Great Lakes region of the Upper Midwest of the United States. It borders Minnesota to the west, Iowa to the southwest, Illinois to the south, Lake Michigan to the east, Michig ...
, with a
Bachelor of Arts
A Bachelor of Arts (abbreviated B.A., BA, A.B. or AB; from the Latin ', ', or ') is the holder of a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate program in the liberal arts, or, in some cases, other disciplines. A Bachelor of Arts deg ...
in Mathematics.
["Executive Profile: James A. Starkey."]
Bloomberg Businessweek. Accessed Dec. 7, 2012 After graduating, Starkey worked at Computer Corporation of America on a research project to build a database machine for ARPAnet.
[Novikova, Marina]
"Interview with Jim Starkey from InterBase World."
IBPhoenix. Feb. 9, 2003. Accessed Dec. 7, 2012
Starkey's first major computer language was STOP, an assembler emulator
written in 1965 and used by IIT for undergraduate instruction. Starkey joined Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in 1975. At DEC, he created the
DATATRIEVE family of products, the DEC Standard Relational Interface,
VAX Rdb/ELN, and designed the software architecture for DATATRIEVE'S database.
[Mager, Peter]
"IEEE Computer Society and GBC/ACM."
Accessed Dec. 7, 2012[Darrow, Barb]
"Database superstar Jim Starkey touts NuoDB's new patent."
Gigaom. Aug. 8, 2012. Accessed Dec. 7, 2012 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
A fourth-generation programming language (4GL) is a high-level computer programming language that belongs to a class of languages envisioned as an advancement upon third-generation programming languages (3GL). Each of the programming language g ...
proofs of concept. Also at DEC, Starkey invented data
BLOBs.
[McCullagh, Paul]
"Introduction to the BLOB Streaming Project."
MySQL Conference and Expo 2008. Accessed Dec. 7, 2012
In 1984 he founded Groton Database Systems which became InterBase Software Corporation in 1986. Interbase was sold to Ashton-Tate in 1991, which in turn was sold to Borland.
[The Firebird FAQ]
"Where can I learn about history of Firebird?"
Accessed Dec. 7, 2012 Borland subsequently incorporated InterBase in its
Delphi
Delphi (; ), in legend previously called Pytho (Πυθώ), was an ancient sacred precinct and the seat of Pythia, the major oracle who was consulted about important decisions throughout the ancient Classical antiquity, classical world. The A ...
product. After leaving Interbase, Starkey began a series of attempts to productize innovative database technology, including
Netfrastructure. He is known fondly as "The Wolf" to Firebird SQL developers (which is an open source branch from InterBase v6.0).
In 2000, Starkey founded Netfrastructure, Inc., a platform for web applications including a relational database, integrated search, a Java virtual machine, and a context-sensitive page generator.
Netfrastructure was acquired by MySQL
and Starkey became a senior software architect at MySQL,
where he started work on Falcon - a new transactional database engine based on the Netfrastructure codebase. He left MySQL in June 2008, a few months after Sun purchased MySQL AB, and Falcon never went beyond beta release.
[Urlocker, Zach]
"Thanks to Jim Starkey, the Father of Falcon."
TheOpenForce.com. Accessed Dec. 7, 2012
In 2008, Jim Starkey incorporated a database company called NimbusDB. The name was formally changed to
NuoDB in 2011.
He is currently working on a new database model called AmorphousDB.
Patents
Jim Starkey has been issued the following United States patents:
*“Database management system,” patented in 2012.
*“Database server system with methods for alerting clients of occurrence of database server events of interest to clients.”
*“Method and apparatus for generating web pages from templates”
U.S. Patent 7,039,658.
Inventor: James A. Starkey. Issued: May 2, 2006
Personal life
Starkey is married to Ann Harrison, who is “a contributor to InterBase’s development.”
External links
Se
Dr. Dobb's Portal for a November 2007 interview with Starkey.
Anothe
Interview with Jim Starkey was done in 2003 from InterBase World website
The History of the Blob and Interbase is on thi
page in the History section of Ibphoenix website
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Starkey, Jim
Living people
1949 births
American computer businesspeople
American technology company founders
Businesspeople from Illinois
University of Wisconsin–Madison College of Letters and Science alumni