Number of Founded Organizations 1
CB Rank (Person) 129,347

Jim Starkey invented the NuoDB Emergent Architecture, and developed the initial implementation of the product. He founded NuoDB [formerly NimbusDB] in 2008, and retired at the end of 2012, shortly before the NuoDB product launch.

Jim’s career as an entrepreneur, architect, and innovator spans more than three decades of database history from

the Datacomputer project on the fledgling ARPAnet to his most recent startup, NuoDB, Inc. Through the period, he has been responsible for many database innovations from the date data type to the BLOB to multi-version concurrency control (MVCC). Starkey has extensive experience in proprietary and open source software.

Starkey joined Digital Equipment Corporation in 1975, where he created the Datatrieve family of products, the DEC Standard Relational Interface architecture, and the first of the Rdb products, Rdb/ELN. Starkey was also software architect for DEC’s database machine group.

Leaving DEC in 1984, Starkey founded Interbase Software to develop relational database software for the engineering workstation market. Interbase was a technical leader in the database industry producing the first commercial implementations of heterogeneous networking, blobs, triggers, two phase commit, database events, etc. Ashton-Tate acquired Interbase Software in 1991, and was, in turn, acquired by Borland International a few months later. The Interbase database engine was released open source by Borland in 2000 and became the basis for the Firebird open source database project.

In 2000, Starkey founded Netfrastructure, Inc., to build a unified platform for distributable, high quality Web applications. The Netfrastructure platform included a relational database engine, an integrated search engine, an integrated Java virtual machine, and a high performance page generator.

MySQL, AB, acquired Netfrastructure, Inc. in 2006 to be the kernel of a wholly owned transactional storage engine for the MySQL server, later known as Falcon. Starkey led the Falcon project through the acquisition of MySQL by Sun Microsystems.

Jim has a degree in Mathematics from the University of Wisconsin. For amusement, Jim codes on weekends, while sailing, but not while flying his plane.

Number of Past Jobs 1
Jim Starkey has had 1 past job as the Founder & Chief Technology Officer at NuoDB.
Organization Name  
Title At Company  
Start Date  
End Date  
NuoDB
Founder & Chief Technology OfficerJun 2008Nov 2012