Mr. Kenneth (Ken) R. Jacobs

Vice President of Product Strategy for Oracle Server Technologies for almost 30 years, he joined Oracle in July 1981. Since then he has held a variety of technical and management roles and historically speaking, he is Oracle employee No. 18. Born on Brooklyn, New York, he graduated in 1971 with a degree in Biology from Oberlin College (Ohio, USA) and performed further graduate work in Computer Science at George Washington University. Prior to joining Oracle, he was with Inslaw Inc., where he managed a team providing computing support to social science survey data research. Prior to this, he worked as a programmer and systems analyst for several companies including: ADP Network Services, The Urban Institute, Oberlin College and The Brookings Institution. He is also known as "Dr. DBA" to thousands of Oracle database administrators, and has been a prominent spokesperson for Oracle and an advocate inside the company for customers' interests. He has helped guide the development of the Oracle Database product over the years. He represented Oracle on the SQL Standards Committee for over seven years, and participated in several other standards activities. He also initiated and led affords to enhance the security features of the Oracle database, working with the National Computer Security Center and other key government agencies. He has also represented Oracle at the Transaction Processing Performance Council. He has a strong interest in open source technologies, and oversaw the InnoDB development group based in Helsinki, Finland. He was Oracle's liaison with the MySQL community for several years, beginning when Oracle acquired the popular MySQL storage engine, InnoDB, a transaction-safe (ACID compliant) storage engine with foreign key support along with commit, rollback, and crash recovery capabilities. InnoDB is distributed as a part of the MySQL database. First released as a part of MySQL in 2001, in October 2005, Oracle purchased the Finland-based Innobase Oy. He is the author of an article published in the Oracle Magazine, May/June 2003, ?Oracle Database Changed the World?. On Friday, February 5, 2010, he announced his resignation from Oracle to key members of the MySQL team via e-mail.