Jason Wharton is the author of the award winning database connectivity component suite IB Objects. He was a co-founder of the InterBase Developers Initiative that answered the call in the days of trouble for InterBase when it was about to get shelved. The efforts of this gathering of those who loved InterBase culminated into securing the InterBase sources into the open source community under the name of Firebird SQL. Jason served as the first Treasurer of the Firebird Foundation and was infamous for sleeping during the meetings because he was up all night talking with conference attendees. Thus, he was awarded the "Sparky of the Year" award from the Firebird Foundation. Undoubtedly if it weren't for those like Jason and many others who asserted the great value of this database it just may have become a thing of the past. Jason is always very passionate about explaining why this database is such a gem to use.