Michael Stonebraker 2014 ACM A.M. Turing Lecture

Michael Stonebraker has made fundamental contributions to database systems, which are one of the critical applications of computers today and contain much of the world’s important data. He is the inventor of many concepts that were crucial to making databases a reality and that are used in almost all modern database systems. His work on Ingres introduced the notion of query modification, used for integrity constraints and views. His later work on Postgres introduced the object-relational model, effectively merging databases with abstract data types while keeping the database separate from the programming language. Stonebraker’s implementations of Ingres and Postgres demonstrated how to engineer database systems that support these concepts; he released these systems as open software, which allowed their widespread adoption and their code bases have been incorporated into many modern database systems. Since the pathbreaking work on Ingres and Postgres, Stonebraker has continued to be a thought leader in the database community and has had a number of other influential ideas including implementation techniques for column stores and scientific databases and for supporting on-line transaction processing and stream processing.

BACKGROUND

Michael Stonebraker is adjunct professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (MIT CSAIL) where he is also co-founder and co-director of the Intel Science and Technology Center for Big Data. Prior to MIT, Stonebraker was professor of computer science at the University of California at Berkeley for 29 years. A graduate of Princeton University, Stonebraker earned his master’s degree and his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan.

Stonebraker received the Software System award with Gerald Held and Eugene Wong for the development of Ingres (IBM’s System R was also recognized). He was the recipient of the inaugural SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovations Award, and received the IEEE John von Neumann Medal. Stonebraker is an ACM Fellow and a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering. Read more at http://www.acm.org/turing-lecture-sto… .