![]() ![]() I’m not in the database business.” Being a database guy is never part of my career goal, and so what can I do about this? And I thought, “Well look, the way we’re using this database - it’s read-only, at least us, and it’s very, very slowly changing otherwise. I would try and connect to the database and wouldn’t be able to, and I would pop up a dialog box that says, “I’m sorry, I can’t connect to the database.” And course, it wasn’t my problem, but my application painted the dialogue box, so I got the support call. When in the database it didn’t come up, the users would double click on my application. They would sometimes power cycle the machine that it was running on, and when it would come back up, Informix database sometimes would not come up, and this was a configuration problem, that’s all it was. Anyway, we put this thing out in the field for testing, and it was in an industrial site, and the people were operating the equipment. It was a really, really cool product and I was a contractor, but I was sort of leading the design. We had to solve an NP-complete problem, which of course we couldn’t solve, but we could do really good approximations and that’s what it was about. The problem that I was working on, it was a really interesting problem. So the customer… They were using Informix for the database engine. But it was read-only, the database was read-only, and I thought why can’t we just read this database directly off of the disk? And so I just said, “Well, I’ll write my own database engine.” So I wrote SQLite and I got to be real popular, and here we are. We used Postgres for a while, that worked well for development. The customer said Informix and, you know, that’s a big hassle to set up and stuff for development purposes. In the course of doing that one time we had a problem where we needed a database engine. That company has been in business now for 24 years. My application was near the bottom of the stack, and so I just started my own company, just developing bespoke software, solving hard problems for people. There were hundreds of candidates for any open position, and I was not the best candidate. Coming out of university with a master’s degree, I took job at Bell Labs, and the first thing they did was sit me down in front of a console, running Unix, and I learned Unix and C, and work there for a few years, quit, went back to graduate school, came out of graduate school in 1992.īack then getting a tenure track position was really, really hard. I went to university, studied Electrical Engineering, didn’t do anything with computers for a while. That’s how I got started in computers, trying to write programs in 4K of RAM, and that 4K included the video memory. ![]() We’ll send you another board.” They sent me another motherboard and that one worked.
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