[DB Seminar] Fall 2017: Barry Morris (NuoDB)

For decades the industry has sought solutions to the challenge of efficient distributed transactions, and ideally to elastically-scalable distributed transactions.  The opportunity for such systems is to provide on-demand capacity, redundancy-based uptime models, and automation of labor-intensive administrative tasks.  Additionally Elastic SQL systems may provide a route to geo-distributed transactions processing.  The approaches to this challenge have all involved very significant trade-offs, and in general they have historically not been widely adopted.

Current approaches to Elastic SQL include two-phase commit (eg.  Google Cloud Spanner), consensus algorithms (eg CockroachDB), and explicit serialization systems (eg Calvin).  The NuODB solution is a radical rethink of classic database architecture.  It is a solution that starts with distributed system principles and asks how such a system can export rich SQL/ACID database services.  The result raises the bar significantly on performance, uptime, cost and cloud-style automation and agility. NuoDB has been adopted by very large enterprises that are moving very large, mission critical database workloads to the cloud.

The talk will cover the NuoDB design approach and the trade-offs that have led to Jim Starkey’s breakthrough architecture.

Bio:
As executive chairman, Barry chairs the Board of Directors and drives the external matters of NuoDB, including industry thought leadership, strategic partnerships and business relationships as well as product and technology strategy. He also serves as an advisor to the CEO and senior leadership on all aspects of the business. Barry is an accomplished software executive with more than 25 years of industry experience in the U.S. and Europe -- startups to publicly held companies. As the founding CEO of NuoDB, Barry built the company from ground up into a successful database company and a leader in scale-out SQL technology. Prior to founding NuoDB, Barry was the CEO at IONA Technologies, where he led Ireland's most successful software company through its strongest period of growth, with more than $180 million in revenues. He was subsequently chairman and chief executive officer of StreamBase Systems, where he turned the company into the market leader in Complex Event Processing (CEP). Barry has also held leadership roles in various companies in the U.S. and Europe, including PROTEK, Metrica, Lotus Development and DEC. Born in South Africa, Barry lived in England and Ireland before moving to the Greater Boston Area. He holds a bachelor’s degree in engineering from New College Oxford University and an honorary doctorate in Business Administration (DBA) from the IMCA. He also serves on boards of several startups in Boston, Ireland and South Africa.