Head Groundskeeper, Parmington Foundation
Gus Björklund is a geek and the Head Groundskeeper at the Parmington Foundation and an independent consultant specializing in the use, care, and feeding of the OpenEdge RDBMS. He is a popular speaker at Progress related conferences.
Before retiring, Mr. Björklund worked at Progress Software for over 27 years, starting in March, 1989. In his first role there, he fixed bugs in version 4.2N of the Progress 4GL. His last role at PSC was as a “DBA for Hire”, part of the Progress-Bravepoint Managed Database Service (aka MDBA) Group. The people in this small group are all highly experienced full-time database administrators that manage over 3,000 OpenEdge databases in the production systems of MDBA customers all over the world.
Before joining the MDBA group, Gus worked on many different parts of the OpenEdge product, starting with bug-fixing in the Progress 4GL. Soon he became the one-man database development group, fixing database bugs and improving performance by several orders of magnitude. Later, he hired other developers to join the group. In addition to managing the database group, he also continued to design and implement new features. Over time he held many different titles (developer, senior engineer, manager, director, VP, DBA, etc.).
For most of his time at Progress, his main focus was on the database. He believes that the OpenEdge RDBMS is “the best RDBMS on the third planet from the sun” and likes to use Linux and Mac OS X. While he has heard that there are other programming languages, he has strong affinity for the 4GL but still refuses to call it the “ABL”.
Before joining PSC, Gus worked on real-time systems, SCADA, factory automation, domain-specific language compilers and runtime systems, and designed several real-time operating systems for use in industrial control systems.
When not working, he clears away the snow, mows the lawn, walks the dog, cooks, and works on his antique automobile. Often, he listens to recorded music on round black plastic things.
