Jim Starkey (born January 6, 1949 in

Illinois Illinois ( ) is a state in the Midwestern United States. Its largest metropolitan areas include the Chicago metropolitan area, and the Metro East section, of Greater St. Louis. Other smaller metropolitan areas include, Peoria and Rockf ...

) is a database architect responsible for developing

InterBase InterBase is a relational database management system (RDBMS) currently developed and marketed by Embarcadero Technologies. InterBase is distinguished from other RDBMSs by its small footprint, close to zero administration requirements, and multi-g ...

, 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 NuoDB is a cloud-native distributed SQL database company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 2008 and incorporated in 2010, NuoDB technology has been used by Dassault Systèmes, as well as FinTech and financial industry entities inclu ...

Education and career

Jim Starkey graduated from

University of Wisconsin A university () is an institution of higher (or tertiary) education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. Universities typically offer both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. In the United States, ...

at Madison,

Wisconsin Wisconsin () is a state in the upper Midwestern United States. Wisconsin is the 25th-largest state by total area and the 20th-most populous. It is bordered by Minnesota to the west, Iowa to the southwest, Illinois to the south, Lake M ...

, with a

Bachelor of Arts Bachelor of arts (BA or AB; from the Latin ', ', or ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate program in the arts, or, in some cases, other disciplines. A Bachelor of Arts degree course is generally completed in three or four year ...

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 DATATRIEVE is a database query and report writer tool originally from Digital Equipment Corporation. It runs on the OpenVMS operating system, as well as several PDP-11 operating systems. DATATRIEVE's command structure is nearly plain English, a ...

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, 2012Darrow, 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 proofs of concept. Also at DEC, Starkey invented the BLOB, a “

binary large object A binary large object (BLOB or blob) is a collection of binary data stored as a single entity. Blobs are typically images, audio or other multimedia objects, though sometimes binary executable code is stored as a blob. They can exist as persistent ...

.”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 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

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 People from Illinois University of Wisconsin–Madison College of Letters and Science alumni