The history of Berkeley DB

Just to clarify, the engineer in that meeting was Peter Vosshall. I wanted to quote the sentence about Amazon rather than the person.

Also, I was a newbie at the time (probably still am) & I consider myself lucky to be in the meeting. They probably let me in on the meeting because I didn’t mind carrying the pager as much. :)

The company got bought out, mostly as acqui-hire for the scientific staff.

The main tech was by a Stanford prof. and one of his ex-grad students. An X-Windows/IRIX-only(!) based tool for molecular modeling. It added support for integrating bioinformatics analyses, gathered from public web servers. Which was cool, but companies wouldn't buy it because sending proprietary data to public sites as a big N-O.

Many companies had similar resources in-house. The program could call out to awk or shell as a configuration language for doing those searches. But our customers were all switching to Perl and didn't care for those languages. So, late in the cycle we added Perl integration support.

There was only one person who could really work on the core tool. (I remember fixing ~10,000 compiler warnings, nearly all because it used a home-brew GUI based on void* function pointers.) There had been a push to port it to the Mac, but that took a year and the fork was unmergeable.

We developed an intranet server product for basic bioinformatics tools in perl that would mirror the core bioinformatics databases, process them for FASTA, BLAST, and text searches. Mind you, this was 1998, so CGI.pm and a home-brew templating language I threw together.

We needed this because we were ramping up science consulting (I don't recall why any more), and needed our own internal tools because proprietary data.

So, Mike came in as VP of engineering, with a product that was hard to maintain, nor could it quite pivot to the new hotness of bioinformatics, nor pivot to the new hotness of the web. (Get this: there was a proof-of-concept version that used a persistent version of the tool running on the developer's desktop, in an off-screen display buffer, which presented a clickable image map to the user. Each click would round-trip another screen shot to the running program.) And without the ability to really hire the people to get out of that hole, because funding was running out.

On the organization level, there was also then-new CEO, who sales and marketing referred to as a tornado, because she would come in and everything would get blown around and mixed up. Not a good boat to be in.

This was also Mike's first VP-level management job, so rather like jumping into the deep end.

Mind you, I was a fresh-behind-the-ears 27 year old, with only 2 years of professional experience in an academic lab. I know little about what the politics was with upper-management. I can agree that it was miserable.

Going back to Sleepycat, I actually evaluated BDB vs GDB vs. a few other technologies for one of our projects, and ended up having problems with all of them. Only after I left, when I met Mike after he started with Sleepycat, did I point out that I he probably should have told me about his connections with BDB. He agreed. ;)