Last February, John Brunett celebrated 40 years at Synergex, making him the most tenured employee in Synergex history. John was one of the first developers hired at Synergex, back in 1984. His first project was converting the DBL language from assembly to C so it could be ported to up-and-coming Unix systems, and he ended up porting it to about 50 different machines.

John is also the architect of several key elements of Synergy/DE software, including ISAM and licensing. He took over the ISAM project in version 5 by implementing segmented keys and other early features. Since then, he’s spearheaded just about every new feature introduced in Synergy DBMS, including xfServer, the isutl utility, I/O hooks, change tracking, and, more recently, Select and Join.

On the eve of his retirement, John looks back at his career and shares some memories with us by answering a couple of questions:

What were your favorite product features to work on?

I think my favorite product to work on was the isutl utility and improving its performance. For version 7, we decided to replace irecovr and ismvfy with a new utility: isutl. And it turned out to be considerably faster. Then in version 11, we decided to rewrite isutl, this time with multi-threading. Again, we saw a considerable performance improvement. 

Now, I wouldn’t be the nerd I am without having some timings to share. I used one of my large test files, 33 million records and 13 keys (about 30 GB total).

• First, I ran the irecovr utility, which took five hours to complete. 
• Then, using the same base file, I ran the version 7 isutl utility, with its key sorting and index creation. This time, it took an amazing 25 minutes. That’s over 10 times faster. 
• Finally, I ran the version 11 isutl with its multi-threading functionality. This time, it only took two minutes and 30 seconds. 

Now you know why I like this stuff!

What was something you did that you did not enjoy very much?

One interesting thing about my early days—before the internet, and when Unix systems were popping up everywhere—is that I had to travel all over the place to port DBL to new Unix machines. Mostly these were in the San Francisco Bay Area, but a few were on the East Coast, as well as a couple abroad.

It got tedious after a while, plus I had to be away from my wife and two-year-old for weeks on end. 

There was one time when they sent me to Albany, New York, to do a port. It was late in the year and colder than I’m used to. The customer set me up in the basement where the computer was. I don’t think there was any heat down there because they wanted to keep the computers cool. 

After a couple days down there (all by myself), they told me the place used to be a mortuary, and the basement was where they had kept the bodies. Thankfully, after that, they moved me upstairs to a warm room. 

Thanks for the memories, John! We’re all going to miss your positivity, thoughtfulness, and passion for helping customers and improving our products. We wish you a very happy retirement!