MySQL will be announcing next week that it has acquired web app technology company Netfrastructure. What is interesting from MySQL’s survival point of view since Oracle has eaten up it’s main database engine suppliers Berkeley DB and InnoDB, is that the founder of Netfrastructure, Jim Starkey is a bigname in the open source database world. Starkey has been a major contributer to the open source database Firebird, which according the analysts usage figures is second behind MySQL itself.
Starkey is also famous for the creation of InterBase (from which Firebird was branched), which was one of the first RDBMSs to have features such as triggers, event alerts, arrays and multiversioning. He was the founder of InterBase Software and also worked for it’s successive owners, Ashton Tate and Borland (anyone remember dBase?).