I first met Ian Howells in London long ago, as fellow footsoldiers in the early relational database wars. While you had to be pretty technical to do product marketing in those days, Ian was technical with a capital T, having just sprung from university with a PhD in distributed databases. We fought together on the losing side of the database wars [1], shared many of the same scars from the experience, learned many of the same lessons, and — I’m reasonably sure — both decided to aim our ...
