Brian Aker

Brian Aker, born August 4, 1972 in Lexington, Kentucky, USA is an open-source hacker who has worked on various Apache modules, the Slash system, and numerous storage engines for the MySQL database. Aker is now the Director of Architecture at MySQL AB.

After graduating with triple majors in environmental science, computing and mathematics, from Antioch College, Aker contributed to his first open source project, the 386BSD operating system. He then moved to work on Slashdot, where his initial task was to rewrite the database back-end to use Oracle. However, he extended the system to ensure it allowed multiple database back-ends, and became a published author along the way, writing "Running Weblogs with Slash" (ISBN 978-0596001001) with chromatic and Dave Krieger. From 2001 to 2007 he posted stories on Slashdot under the Author name of "Krow".

Aker first involved himself with the MySQL project in 1998. In 2001 he released an early prototype of MySQL with perl based functions and later went from VA Linux Systems to MySQL to lead development of the 4.1 and 5.0 versions of the MySQL Database Server. [cite web |author=O'Reilly |title=Audio Interview with Brian Aker on the Future of Databases |publisher=O'Reilly |url=http://news.oreilly.com/2008/06/brian-akers-vision-for-a-livab.html ] He has presented projects integrating MySQL with a number of technologies, including a working version of MySQL with Java based functions with Eric Herman in 2004 [cite web |author=Slashdot |title=MySQL Gets Functions in Java |publisher=Slashdot |url=http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/12/19/1628241 ]

Aker has been known to offer a Perl Certification Course at the University of Washington. He has also worked on the [http://vh.org/ Virtual Hospital] project, providing the Internet's first medical website, while at the University of Iowa Hospital and Clinics.

While not travelling, and presenting at about six open source related conferences a year, he resides in Seattle, Washington. Some of the conferences Aker has presented at, are OSCON, Linuxfest Northwest, and the MySQL Users Conference & Expo. He is also the maintainer of the C client library for the Memcached server.

For fun, Aker also hacks his home telephone system, to be powered by the Asterisk (PBX) [cite web |author=LifeHacker |title=Hack Your Home Telephone with Asterisk |publisher=LifeHacker |url=http://lifehacker.com/software/telephony/hack-your-home-telephone-with-asterisk-301195.php |accessdate=2007-09-24 ] .

A list of MySQL projects Brian Aker has created:
* The Drizzle Database server
* MySQL Archive Storage Engine
* MySQL Federated Storage Engine
* Memcached Storage Engine
* CSV Storage Engine
* Blackhole Storage Engine
* WebMethods (HTTP) Storage Engine

References

External links

* [http://www.linux.com/articles/60359 Portrait: Brian Aker, database strategist]
* [http://www.linuxworld.com/news/2007/061307-brian-aker-interview.html Interview with Brian Aker]
* [http://interviews.slashdot.org/interviews/07/11/28/0019253.shtml Slashdot Interview with Brian Aker]
* [http://krow.livejournal.com/ Brian Aker's Blog]
* [http://news.oreilly.com/2008/06/brian-akers-vision-for-a-livab.html Audio Interview with Brian Aker on the Future of Databases]
* [http://www.linux.com/articles/35831 Interview with Brian Aker on how to get a job as an open source developer]
* [http://tangent.org/ Public Open Source Software Repository]
* [http://www.twit.tv/floss35 Interview with Brian Aker] on FLOSS Weekly