Michael Stonebreaker Wins Turing Award 2014

Michael Stonebraker

Professor Michael Stonebraker from the Department of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, known for his revolutionary developments in the DBMS and as the founder of several companies in this field, is named the 2014 Turing Prize , which is considered to be an analogue of the Nobel Prize in computer science.

In particular, Stonebreaker developed two DBMS Ingres and Postgre, which had a significant impact on the development of the industry, in particular, influencing the development of many other projects, including IBM Informix and EMC Greenplum.

For the first time, a $ 1 million prize sponsored by Google will be paid in full. Announced

its decision todayorganizing committee of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).

In a published statement, ACM says that Stonebreaker "invented many of the concepts that are used in almost all modern databases ... and founded the many companies that have successfully commercialized his innovative developments in the field of DBMS."

As a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stonebreaker often joked about the fact that he himself had not known for 30 years what exactly he had invented until there were a lot of marketing companies that started talking about "big data." “And here I realized that I was studying this area for most of my scientific life.”

Among the companies founded by the scientist are VoltDB, Tamr, Paradigm4 and Vertica (the latter acquired Hewlett-Packard in 2011 for $ 340 million).

Its Ingres DBMS was one of the first relational databases in the world to store data in a more organized way and which is now considered the corporate standard for data storage. During the creation of this technology, many colleagues believed that relational DBMSs could not take a step from a theoretical description to a practical implementation.

At the same time, Postgres implemented the ideas of Ingres in combination with object-oriented programming.

Other Stonebreaker projects: C-Store, H-Store, and SciDB.

It is important to note that in those days when the term “open source” did not exist at all, Stonebreaker without question published the source codes of many of his programs, giving them to the public domain.