Michael Stonebraker

Michael Ralph Stonebraker (born October 11, 1943 ) is a computer scientist specializing in database systems.

Through a series of academic prototypes and commercial startups, Stonebraker's research and products are central to many relational databases.

He is also the founder of many database companies, including Ingres Corporation, Illustra, Paradigm4, StreamBase Systems, Tamr, Vertica and VoltDB, and served as chief technical officer of Informix.

He earned his B.S.E. in electrical engineering from Princeton University in 1965, and his M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1967 and 1971 respectively.

His awards include the IEEE John von Neumann Medal and the first SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovations Award.

By the mid-1970s, Stonebraker's team produced, using a rotating team of student programmers, a usable relational database system.

At the time Ingres was considered "low end" compared to IBM's System R, as it ran on Unix-based Digital Equipment Corporation machines as opposed to the "big iron" IBM mainframes.

Stonebraker joined University of California, Berkeley as an assistant professor in 1971, and taught in the computer science department for twenty-nine years.

It was there that he did his early pioneering work on relational databases.

In 1973, Stonebraker and his colleague Eugene Wong started researching relational database systems after reading a series of seminal papers published by Edgar F. Codd on the relational data model.

Their project, known as Ingres (Interactive Graphics and Retrieval System), was one of the first systems (along with System R from IBM) to demonstrate that it was possible to build a practical and efficient implementation of the relational model.

A number of key ideas from INGRES are still widely used in relational systems, including the use of B-trees, primary-copy replication, the query rewrite approach to views and integrity constraints, and the idea of rules/triggers for integrity checking in an RDBMS.

Additionally, much experimental work was done that provided insights into how to build a locking system that could provide satisfactory transaction performance.

By the early 1980s, however, the performance and capabilities of these low-end machines were seriously threatening IBM's mainframe market, and with the threat came the ability of Ingres to become a viable, "real" product for a large number of applications.

Ingres used a variation of the BSD license for a nominal fee, and soon a number of companies took advantage of this to create commercial versions of Ingres.

These included Stonebraker, who with fellow Berkeley professors Larry Rowe and Eugene Wong helped found Relational Technology, Inc., later called Ingres Corporation.

In 1994 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.

Informix acquired Illustra in 1996, and Stonebraker became Informix's CTO, a position he held until September 2000.

Informix integrated Illustra's O–R mapping and DataBlades into the 7.x OnLine product, resulting in Informix Universal Server (IUS), or more generally, Version 9.

After the Postgres project, Stonebraker initiated the Mariposa project which became the basis of Cohera Corporation.

Mariposa built a federated database over an economic model of resource trading, in which data distributed across multiple organizations could be integrated and queried from a single relational interface, governed by site-specific policies that would charge for data processing and storage.

In 1997, he was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering for the development and commercialization of relational and object-relational database systems.

Stonebraker's career can be broadly divided into two phases: his time at University of California, Berkeley when he focused on relational database management systems such as Ingres and Postgres, and, starting in 2001, at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where he developed more novel data management techniques such as C-Store, H-Store, SciDB and DBOS.

Stonebraker is currently a professor emeritus at UC Berkeley and an adjunct professor at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

He is also known as an editor for the book Readings in Database Systems.

Stonebraker grew up in Milton, New Hampshire.

Subsequently, sold to Computer Associates, Ingres was re-established as an independent company in 2005, and later renamed Actian.

Other startups based on Ingres include Sybase, founded by Robert Epstein, a student on the project, and Britton Lee, Inc. Sybase's code was later used as a basis for Microsoft SQL Server.

After founding Relational Technology, Stonebraker and Rowe began a "post-Ingres" effort, to address the limitations of the relational model.

The new project was named POSTGRES (POST inGRES), and was designed to add support for complex data types to database systems and improve end-to-end performance of data-intensive applications.

Postgres provided an object relational programming model in which fields could be complex datatypes, and where users could register new types as well as scalar and aggregate functions over those types.

Postgres was extensible in a number of other ways, making it easy for programmers to modify or add to the optimizer, query language, runtime, and indexing frameworks.

These features improved both database programmability and performance, and made it possible to push large portions of a number of applications inside the database, including geographic information systems and time series processing.

This had the effect of substantially broadening the commercial database market.

Postgres was also offered using a BSD-like license, and the code forms the basis of the free software, PostgreSQL.

Stonebraker also led an effort to commercialize the code, creating Illustra which was purchased by Informix.

PostgreSQL has been used as the basis for a number of other startup companies, including Aster Data Systems, EnterpriseDB, and Greenplum.

For his contributions to database research, Stonebraker received the 2014 Turing Award, often described as "the Nobel Prize for computing."

In March 2015 it was announced he won the 2014 ACM Turing Award.

In September 2015, he won the 2015 Commonwealth Award, chosen by council members of MassTLC.