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Michael Stonebraker wins Turing Award

528 points| assface | 11 years ago |newsoffice.mit.edu

74 comments

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[+] turingbook|11 years ago|reply
His creativity is amazing: founder of a number of database companies, including Ingres, Illustra, Cohera, StreamBase Systems, Vertica, VoltDB, and Paradigm4...at MIT, where he has been involved in the development of the Aurora, C-Store, H-Store, Morpheus, and SciDB systems [1]

And his students:

-Daniel Abadi (co-founder and Chief Scientist of Hadapt)

-Michael J. Carey (faculty at UC Irvine, formerly at U. Wisconsin Madison, NAE Member and ACM Fellow)

-Robert Epstein (founder and former VP of Engineering of Sybase)

-Diane Greene (co-founder and former CEO of VMWare)

-Paula Hawthorn (founder of Britton-Lee, formerly VP of Engineering of Informix)

-Marti Hearst (Professor at UC Berkeley)

-Gerald Held (former VP of Engineering of Oracle)

-Joseph M. Hellerstein (faculty at UC Berkeley)

-Anant Jhingran (VP and CTO for IBM's Information Management Division)

-Curt Kolovson (Sr. Staff Research Scientist at VMware)

-Clifford A. Lynch (executive director of the Coalition for Networked Information)

-Mike Olson (former CEO of Sleepycat Software and founding CEO of Cloudera)

-Margo Seltzer (Professor of Computer Science at Harvard, founder and former CTO of Sleepycat Software)

-Dale Skeen (founder of Tibco, founder and CEO of Vitria)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Stonebraker

[+] makmanalp|11 years ago|reply
For those who are unfamiliar with his work, he worked on ingres, and postgres, which are now the bases for postgresql.

He worked on Aurora (http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~magda/aurora-medusa.pdf), which I don't think ever got a lot of commercial success, but was one of the earlier stream databases.

He also has some amazing work on non-traditional databases, for example he worked on H-store (http://hstore.cs.brown.edu/) which is now voltdb, which is an in-memory distributed database.

And then C-Store was the basis for Vertica: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-Store

I'm pretty sure Margo Seltzer (of BerkeleyDB fame) was his student at some point too.

Truly amazing researcher - and I think an example to those who focus on a teeny tiny minor niche their entire career and never explore anything else.

[+] hoopism|11 years ago|reply
Also doing some really interesting work @ Tamr. Worth checking out.
[+] arca_vorago|11 years ago|reply
I became fascinated with what Stonebraker was saying back when I got into the biotech industry. We were dealing with huge amounts of data and the more I read from him the more it made sense to me, particularly when he talks about the lack of ACID in NoSQL stuff being a bad thing. I have a couple of projects involving VoltDB and SciDB on the backburner, and any future projects I plan on using VoltDB in if possible and applicable, and so far I am pretty convinced that they are much more useful than people understand.

If you haven't read up on either VoltDB or SciDB or Stonebraker himself, I highly suggest you do, as it might make you think twice about some of your current setups. Here's a few quotes for the fun of it:

"I think the biggest NoSQL proponent of non-ACID has been historically a guy named Jeff Dean at Google, who’s responsible for, essentially, most to all of their database offerings. And he recently … wrote a system called Spanner,” Stonebraker explained. “Spanner is a pure ACID system. So Google is moving to ACID and I think the NoSQL market will move away from eventual consistency and toward ACID.”

“My prediction is that NoSQL will come to mean not yet SQL,”

"You saw that they went for Cassandra for inbox search and HBase for messaging. The reason they're not doing that on MySQL is that sharding MySQL is a lot of effort and you have to apply that effort to each new project."

That should be enough to get your curiosity piqued.

[+] notwedtm|11 years ago|reply
A lot of that seems like anecdotal at a best. Now, I'm not one to argue with someone who has as much experience as Stonebreaker, but it seems like he's looking at a few specific use cases, and formulating a broad opinion on NoSQL from them.

There are plenty of use cases where ACID compliance truly isn't needed.

Also, just because Google has one new database that features ACID compliance, does not mean that "Google is moving to ACID", it simply means that Google has identified a need for a portion of their data to be stored in an ACID compliant way.

[+] binarymax|11 years ago|reply
Very well deserved. I've looked over dozens of papers for relational db's and every single one of them cites down to his foundational work. Congratulations Professor Stonebraker!
[+] timtadh|11 years ago|reply
Agreed. I remember being very inspired by some of his papers when I started studying databases in grad school. His work along with all of those who developed the B-Tree and its variants[1] is really foundational to data storage and retrieval. He also helped to kick off the "NoSQL" and "NewSQL" movements with his C-Store paper.[2]

[1] Proposed by Bayer and McCreight, and independently developed by Chiat and Schwartz, and also by Cole, Radcliffe and Kaufman, improved by many including D. Knuth.

[2] C-Store: A Column Oriented DBMS. Mike Stonebraker, Daniel Abadi, Adam Batkin, Xuedong Chen, Mitch Cherniack, Miguel Ferreira, Edmond Lau, Amerson Lin, Sam Madden, Elizabeth O'Neil, Pat O'Neil, Alex Rasin, Nga Tran and Stan Zdonik. VLDB, pages 553-564, 2005.

[+] a3n|11 years ago|reply
And yet:

> An adjunct professor of computer science and engineering at MIT

Adjunct? Does this mean something different at MIT? Or is it some form of convenience for Stonebraker?

[+] AlisdairO|11 years ago|reply
Absolutely. The man is outstandingly influential.
[+] aklarfeld|11 years ago|reply
His newest venture Tamr, is also really interesting. Unifying data with Machine Learning and Human input. I recommend keeping an eye on this one.

www.tamr.com

[+] nwatson|11 years ago|reply
Stonebraker was tech advisor starting in 2001 for Addamark/Sensage, which developed a column-oriented/columnar DB for log aggregation/analysis for security/operations. Stonebraker's own C-Store and Vertica came later and were more fully featured. While Sensage's product was integrated into some HP offerings, HP unfortunately (my perspective) chose to buy rival Arcsight and then Vertica.

See discussion and comment from Adam Sah at http://radar.oreilly.com/2008/11/the-commoditization-of-mass... for more context for column-storage and log analysis.

edit: link to article.

[+] asah|11 years ago|reply
Thx for the mention.

Mike was my thesis advisor at Cal, and had enormous influence on all sorts of things beyond databases, including (I believe) the founding of the CS department and the negotiation of how Ingres technology spin off from Cal (which owns the IP), which became the prototype for how others would create companies like Inktomi and many more.

[+] InternetUser|11 years ago|reply
For those who want to know about the various projects he has worked on:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingres_%28database%29

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illustra

http://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/analysis/1943302/disparate-databas...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StreamBase_Systems

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertica

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VoltDB

http://www.paradigm4.com/

http://cs.brown.edu/research/aurora/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-Store

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-Store

http://publications.csail.mit.edu/abstracts/abstracts07/ston...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SciDB

[+] reinhardt1053|11 years ago|reply
His book "Readings in Database Systems" 4th edition http://www.amazon.com/Readings-Database-Systems-Joseph-Helle...
[+] binarymax|11 years ago|reply
Keep in mind this book is really just a large collection of core papers. If you are looking for something more structured as a how-to of developing DBs this is useful as a reference but not the best introduction.
[+] Adam_O|11 years ago|reply
He also contributed 2 modules to the recent "Tackling the Challenges of Big Data" online course from MITx. Among other things, he did a very lucid roundup of legacy vs modern db systems.
[+] jestinjoy1|11 years ago|reply
Though most articles says his open source contributions, Wikipedia page says "PostgreSQL evolved from the Ingres project at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1982 the leader of the Ingres team, Michael Stonebraker, left Berkeley to make a proprietary version of Ingres"
[+] mfisher87|11 years ago|reply
I think I watched a talk by Michael a few years back about the basics of columnar databases but now I can't find it. I recognized the names of the companies he founded from the article. At least I think it was him that gave the talk! Does anyone know what I'm talking about?
[+] ww520|11 years ago|reply
He is very very good. I had his undergrad database class long time ago. His class was one of my favorites. What he taught I can still use today. I've just done a merge-join thing recently based on what I remembered from his class.