Jim Starkey - Education and Career

Education and Career

Jim Starkey graduated from University of Wisconsin at Madison, Wisconsin, with a Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics. After graduating, Starkey worked at Computer Corporation of America on a research project to build a database machine for ARPAnet.

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 1977. At DEC, he created the Datatrieve family of products, the DEC Standard Relational Interface, Rdb/ELN (now part of Oracle), and designed the software architecture for Datatrieve’s database. 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. Also at DEC, Starkey invented the BLOB, a “binary large object.”

In 1984 he founded Groton Database Systems which became InteBase Software Corporation in 1986. 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).

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, which was acquired by Oracle. Starkey became a senior software architect at MySQL.

At MySQL, Starkey created Falcon - a new transactional database engine based on the Netfrastructure codebase, but left MySQL in June 2008.

In 2008, Jim Starkey incorporated a database company called NimbusDB. The name was formally changed to NuoDB in 2011.

Read more about this topic:  Jim Starkey

Famous quotes containing the words education and, education and/or career:

    “Our children will not survive our habits of thinking, our failures of the spirit, our wreck of the universe into which we bring new life as blithely as we do. Mostly, our children will resemble our own misery and spite and anger, because we give them no choice about it. In the name of motherhood and fatherhood and education and good manners, we threaten and suffocate and bind and ensnare and bribe and trick children into wholesale emulation of our ways.”
    —June Jordan (b. 1939)

    “There used to be housekeepers with more energy than sense—the everlasting scrubber; the over-neat woman. Since the better education of woman has come to stay, this type of woman has disappeared almost, if not entirely.”
    —Caroline Nichols Churchill (1833–?)

    “It is a great many years since at the outset of my career I had to think seriously what life had to offer that was worth having. I came to the conclusion that the chief good for me was freedom to learn, think, and say what I pleased, when I pleased. I have acted on that conviction... and though strongly, and perhaps wisely, warned that I should probably come to grief, I am entirely satisfied with the results of the line of action I have adopted.”
    —Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)