Grant Allen has over 20 years of experience as a CTO, enterprise architect, and database administrator in the IT industry. Grant's experience spans private industry, academia, and government agencies all around the world, with a focus on global-scale system design, development, and performance. He speaks frequently at corporate and academic conferences on themes ranging from data mining to compliance, as well as technologies such as databases (DB2, Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL), content management, collaboration, disruptive innovation, and Android ecosystems. His initial Android app was a task list that served as a reminder to him to complete all of his other unfinished Android apps. Grant works at Google and is working on a Ph.D. on creating innovative high-tech environments in his leisure time. Grant is the lead author of Oracle SQL Recipes and The Ultimate Guide to SQLite, as well as the author of Starting DB2.