So the customer… They were using Informix for the database engine. The problem that I was working on, it was a really interesting problem. 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. It was a really, really cool product and I was a contractor, but I was sort of leading the design. 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. 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. There was nothing wrong with Informix. They just hadn’t installed it right.

When in the database it didn’t come up, the users would double click on my application. 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. And I thought “This is not a good thing. 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. If the computer is healthy enough to bring up my application, why can’t I read the data directly off of disk? Why do I have to go through a server to get to my data?” There was a funding interruption, I had couple months off and I thought, “Hey, I’m just gonna go and cobble together a really quick and simple database engine that just does a few very simple SQL commands, insert the lead, update and select.” No joints, wasn’t trying to be efficient… All I needed to do was pull stuff off of a disk in that memory.

And I put it out there and… I’ve been doing open source for years before this, putting things on my website, and people would find my thing – or well, you know, I’d put things on my website and it’d get like five downloads per year, or something like that. I’d figured this would be just another one of those things, but for whatever reason it really resonated with people.

I remember seeing on Net News, somebody had this really exciting post on Net News about, “Wow! I have an SQL database engine running on my palm pilot. This is no joke.”

Of course, whenever people get excited about your software, an ego boost kicks in any you’re like, “I’m gonna work on this and make it a little bit better.”