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.
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