Damien Katz, Creator of CouchDB and CouchOne Founder

Damien Katz is the creator of CouchDB and founder of CouchOne. He began his engineering career working on Lotus Notes for Iris Associates, acquired by IBM. Further work at MySQL cemented his database engineering credibility. With a number of patents under his belt and broad acknowledgement of the superior sync capabilities of Notes, Damien set out to create a new kind of database better suited to the needs of web and cloud computing.

In April, 2005 he posted on his blog about a new database engine he was working on, stating it would be a "storage system for a large scale object database" and that it would be called CouchDB (Cluster Of Unreliable Commodity Hardware). It was designed from the ground up to serve web applications and was written the Erlang OTP platform because of its world class reliability and concurrency. In 2008, it became a top-level Apache project maintained at the Apache Software Foundation. In 2009, Damien, along with J. Chris Anderson and Jan Lehnardt, founded CouchOne. The initial investment is from Redpoint Ventures.

Presentation: "Panel: Data in the Cloud"

Track: Real Life Cloud Architectures

Time: Friday 16:50 - 17:50

Location: Olympic Room

Abstract: Scaling out the data tier has always been a challenge, but it is exacerbated in the cloud. By nature, cloud computing environments are dynamic and elastic. That, coupled with the fact that today's applications need to handle web-scale data volumes and transactions, makes the traditional approaches to data management unfeasible. This panel will discuss the unique challenges of managing data in the cloud -- and the solutions from a variety of perspectives: database-as-a-service, NoSQL, cloud-specialized relational databases and more.