Brian Aker, born August 4, 1972 in Lexington,

Kentucky Kentucky ( , ), officially the Commonwealth of Kentucky, is a state in the Southeastern region of the United States and one of the states of the Upper South. It borders Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio to the north; West Virginia and Virginia to ...

, 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 the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

hacker A hacker is a person skilled in information technology who uses their technical knowledge to achieve a goal or overcome an obstacle, within a computerized system by non-standard means. Though the term ''hacker'' has become associated in popu ...

who has worked on various

Apache The Apache () are a group of culturally related Native American tribes in the Southwestern United States, which include the Chiricahua, Jicarilla, Lipan, Mescalero, Mimbreño, Ndendahe (Bedonkohe or Mogollon and Nednhi or Carrizaleño an ...

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 ...

system, and numerous storage engines for the

MySQL MySQL () is an 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 relational database o ...

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 as r ...

until it was acquired by

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, the ...

. 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, United States. HPE was founded on November 1, 2015, in Palo Alto, California, as part of the splitting of the H ...

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

Antioch College Antioch College is a private liberal arts college in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Founded in 1850 by the Christian Connection, the college began operating in 1852 as a non-sectarian institution; politician and education reformer Horace Mann was its f ...

, Aker contributed to his first open source project, the

386BSD 386BSD (also known as "Jolix") is a discontinued Unix operating system based on the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). It was released in 1992 and ran on PC-compatible computer systems based on the 32-bit Intel 80386 microprocessor. 386BSD inn ...

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also in ...

. He then moved to work on

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

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

Oracle An oracle is a person or agency considered to provide wise and insightful counsel or prophetic predictions, most notably including precognition of the future, inspired by deities. As such, it is a form of divination. Description The word '' ...

. 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 most often used to characterize scales, and are also applied to musical instruments, intervals, chords, notes, musical styles, and kinds of harmony. They are very often used as a pair, ...

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 Geeknet, Inc. is a Fairfax County, Virginia–based company that is a subsidiary of GameStop. The company was formerly known as VA Research, VA Linux Systems, VA Software, and SourceForge, Inc. History VA Research VA Research was founded in Nove ...

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 family of two high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming languages. "Perl" refers to Perl 5, but from 2000 to 2019 it also referred to its redesigned "sister language", Perl 6, before the latter's name was offici ...

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 a seaport city on the West Coast of the United States. It is the seat of King County, Washington. With a 2020 population of 737,015, it is the largest city in both the state of Washington and the Pacific Northwest regio ...

, Washington. Some of the conferences Aker has presented at are OSCON,

LinuxFest Northwest LinuxFest Northwest is an annual technology conference and expo held in Bellingham, Washington. It is a Saturday and Sunday weekend event held in late April or early May. The event is dedicated to discussion and development of the Linux operating ...

Southern California Linux Expo The Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) is an annual Linux, open source and free software conference held in Los Angeles, California, since 2002. Despite having Linux in its name, SCALE covers all open source operating systems and software. It i ...

, and the MySQL Users Conference & Expo. He is also the maintainer of the C client library for the

Memcached Memcached (pronounced variously ''mem-cash-dee'' or ''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 objects in RAM to reduce the number of t ...

server. He also maintains the current version of

. He is a commentator on the prolific creation of

NoSQL A NoSQL (originally referring to "non- SQL" or "non-relational") database provides a mechanism for storage and retrieval of data that is modeled in means other than the tabular relations used in relational databases. Such databases have existed ...

databases giving

Ignite To ignite is the first step of firelighting. Ignite may also refer to: Music *Ignite (band), a melodic hardcore band from Orange County, California * ''Ignite'' (Econoline Crush album), 2007 * ''Ignite'' (Shihad album), 2010 * "Ignite" (Eir Aoi s ...

talks on its evolution. A list of

projects Brian Aker has created: * The Drizzle Database server * MySQL Archive Storage Engine * MySQL Federated Storage Engine *

Memcache Memcached (pronounced variously ''mem-cash-dee'' or ''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 objects in RAM to reduce the number of t ...

d 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 FLOSS Weekly is a free and open-source software (FLOSS) themed netcast from the TWiT Network. The show premiered on April 7, 2006, and features interviews with prominent guests from the free software/open source community. It was originally hoste ...

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