8 ms·

Michael Stonebraker wins Turing Award

528 points by assface 12y ago

binarymax 12y ago
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!
- AlisdairO 12y ago
  Absolutely. The man is outstandingly influential.
- greaterscope 12y ago
  Seconded. He was on episode 199 of Software Engineering Radio two years ago (http://www.se-radio.net/2013/12/episode-199-michael-stonebraker/ http://www.se-radio.net/2013/12/episode-199-michael-stonebra...), which I thoroughly enjoyed. It was so informative that I took a page of notes while listening! Really great stuff.
- timtadh 12y ago
  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 12y ago
  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?
  - peterfirefly 12y ago
    Most likely the latter. He was a full professor at Berkeley before that.
  - Turing_Machine 12y ago
    He was a professor at Berkeley for 29 years. He's cashed out a number of successful businesses, so it's not likely that he needs money. He's in his 70s. I would guess he still likes to teach and do research, but maybe not as a full-time professor. Adjuncts don't have to go to committee meetings. :-)
    - dgacmu 12y ago
      Yup. In the case of people like Stonebraker -- or Butler Lampson, who's also officially adjunct at MIT -- Think of it as: You get an office, a community, resources with which to do research (and a framework within which to ask for grant/funding if you want), opportunities to advise students, the ability to teach classes when you want. In exchange, you don't get much money -- but also almost zero responsibilities unless you choose to assume them. (source: I'm a CS professor and I got my Ph.D. at MIT while both Stonebraker and Lampson were there.)
  - dpritchett 12y ago
    This is what adjuncting is supposed to be for - folks with industry experience moonlight as professors. The benefit is not primarily salary but networking, knowledge sharing, and helping the next generation of industry professionals. Now it's more of a way to have 2/3 or more of the department work for unliveable wages which allows for an ever-growing administrative overhead in colleges while tuitions double every decade.
    - hga 12y ago
      As far as I know, not true at MIT, teaching is done by tenured or tenture track professors, with exceptions like this, or SF author Joe Haldeman, that prove the rule. But, yeah, I hear from lots of sources that adjuncts making peanuts have become the rule rather than the exception in general US academia, and there's no disputing how administrators are taking over higher education, now even desiring to wrest little the faculty still control from them.
reinhardt1053 12y ago
His book "Readings in Database Systems" 4th edition http://www.amazon.com/Readings-Database-Systems-Joseph-Hellerstein/dp/0262693143 http://www.amazon.com/Readings-Database-Systems-Joseph-Helle...
- binarymax 12y ago
  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.
  - nimrody 12y ago
    Could you recommend something more appropriate for someone who would like to explore the world of database implementations?
    - AlisdairO 12y ago
      For an overview of basic concepts in DB implementation, I quite like Database Systems: The Complete Book (By Widom I think...). You could do a lot worse than An Introduction to Database Systems (CJ Date), although many dislike his opinionated style :-). If you're talking about actually implementing a full transactional database system, strong foundational books are: Transaction Processing: Concepts and Techniques (Gray and Reuter) Transactional Information Systems: Theory, Algorithms, and the Practice of Concurrency Control and Recovery (Vossen and Weikum) Neither are exactly easy reading, but the concepts therein are really important.
      - timtadh 12y ago
        +1 on all of those books. If you are interested in multi-dimensional indices (R-Trees, M-Trees, and many more exotic ones). You should checkout "Foundations of Multidimensional and Metric Data Structures" by Hanan Samet. Very comprehensive! "Database Systems: The Complete Book" is fantastic (pick up the previous version it is cheaper!) but it only touches on multidimensional indexing. Also if you are interested in B-Trees start with "The Ubiquitous B-Tree" by Comer. [ http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/356770.356776 http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/356770.356776 ].
makmanalp 12y ago
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 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/ 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 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.
- Alex3917 12y ago
  Also his YouTube videos are highly worth watching: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=michael+stonebraker https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=michael+stonebr...
  - assface 12y ago
    Fun Fact: Stonebraker used to party with Michael Jackson in the early 1980s when Thriller came out: https://youtu.be/LCXWF-OEIkc?t=6m17s https://youtu.be/LCXWF-OEIkc?t=6m17s
    - leonardinius 12y ago
      Fun fact, it's Pete Carter as Michael Jackson https://youtu.be/LCXWF-OEIkc?t=639 https://youtu.be/LCXWF-OEIkc?t=639
      - denzil_correa 12y ago
        He got me there for a moment. Pete Carter also says that Stonebraker wrote lyrics for "Beat It".
    - 12y ago
nmc 12y ago
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:SijAcDvflDMJ:https://newsoffice.mit.edu/2015/michael-stonebraker-wins-turing-award-0325+&cd=1 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:SijAcDv... Google cache in case you have trouble reaching the website (apparently under some understandably heavy load).
gamache 12y ago
newsoffice.mit.edu is not enjoying all this traffic. Article text: http://pastebin.com/MTdagueN http://pastebin.com/MTdagueN
nwatson 12y ago
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-massive.html http://radar.oreilly.com/2008/11/the-commoditization-of-mass... for more context for column-storage and log analysis. edit: link to article.
- asah 12y ago
  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.
denzil_correa 12y ago
Official Press Release from ACM. http://www.acm.org/press-room/news-releases/2015/turing-award-14/ http://www.acm.org/press-room/news-releases/2015/turing-awar...
arca_vorago 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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.
  - arca_vorago 12y ago
    I don't disagree, but I think what he is trying to convey is that there are a lot of place where ACID is needed but isn't being put into place. He's not arguing against non-ACID, he's saying people are using non-ACID systems where they shouldn't. It's a small but important distinction.
aetch 12y ago
Cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://newsoffice.mit.edu/2015/michael-stonebraker-wins-turing-award-0325 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/...
aklarfeld 12y ago
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
turingbook 12y ago
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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Stonebraker
- ianlee 12y ago
  Don't forget his newest company - Tamr! http://www.tamr.com/ http://www.tamr.com/
- InternetUser 12y ago
  Here are the links to the top info pages for each of the projects you named: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9267844 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9267844
hpvic03 12y ago
The link is broken, change https to http.
- dang 12y ago
  Thanks. Fixed.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
krat0sprakhar 12y ago
To know more about Professor Stonebraker I cant recommend this excellent interview[0] by se-radio enough. Its easily one of the best interviews that I've heard on a podcast. Do check it out. [0] - http://www.se-radio.net/2013/12/episode-199-michael-stonebraker/ http://www.se-radio.net/2013/12/episode-199-michael-stonebra...
ixtli 12y ago
If he's only an adjunct, I wonder what you need to do to get full professorship at MIT.
- hga 12y ago
  The desire to put in that sort of work to the exclusion of building things and companies, it would appear in his case. He was a full professor at Berkeley. He's also getting old, past the normal age for a MIT professor to become Emeritus.
- sriram_malhar 12y ago
  It's his choice to be an adjunct. Butler Lampson is one too.
Adam_O 12y ago
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.
ww520 12y ago
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.
justin66 12y ago
Question about the Turing Award, something I wonder about whenever this comes up: how did Claude Shannon never win it?
- pc2g4d 12y ago
  Perhaps information theory was viewed as more EE than CS?
niels_olson 12y ago
That's the first Turing winner I've met. Thanks to philg for bringing Professor Stonebraker in for his 3-day database course. http://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/rdbms-iap-2015 http://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/rdbms-iap-2015
CurtMonash 12y ago
Of course, I've been writing about Mike for a while. :) http://www.softwarememories.com/2007/01/21/why-michael-stonebraker-matters/ http://www.softwarememories.com/2007/01/21/why-michael-stone... http://www.dbms2.com/category/michael-stonebraker/ http://www.dbms2.com/category/michael-stonebraker/ Also http://www.monash.com/test-consult.html#stone http://www.monash.com/test-consult.html#stone :)
mkramlich 12y ago
well deserved. congratulations to Mr. Stonebraker (among other things I was part of one of the first early adopter teams that used his Streambase product, while at Orbitz.)
mfisher87 12y ago
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?
jestinjoy1 12y ago
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"
InternetUser 12y ago
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/Ingres_%28database%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illustra https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illustra http://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/analysis/1943302/disparate-databases-rounded-cohera http://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/analysis/1943302/disparate-databas... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StreamBase_Systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StreamBase_Systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertica https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertica https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VoltDB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VoltDB http://www.paradigm4.com/ http://www.paradigm4.com/ http://cs.brown.edu/research/aurora/ http://cs.brown.edu/research/aurora/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-Store https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-Store https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-Store https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-Store http://publications.csail.mit.edu/abstracts/abstracts07/stonebraker-abstract1/stonebraker-abstract1.html http://publications.csail.mit.edu/abstracts/abstracts07/ston... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SciDB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SciDB
findjashua 12y ago
He's the creator of postgres. Enough said!

528 points by assface 12y ago

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!

AlisdairO 12y ago
Absolutely. The man is outstandingly influential.
greaterscope 12y ago
Seconded. He was on episode 199 of Software Engineering Radio two years ago (http://www.se-radio.net/2013/12/episode-199-michael-stonebraker/ http://www.se-radio.net/2013/12/episode-199-michael-stonebra...), which I thoroughly enjoyed. It was so informative that I took a page of notes while listening! Really great stuff.
timtadh 12y ago
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 12y ago
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?
- peterfirefly 12y ago
  Most likely the latter. He was a full professor at Berkeley before that.
- Turing_Machine 12y ago
  He was a professor at Berkeley for 29 years. He's cashed out a number of successful businesses, so it's not likely that he needs money. He's in his 70s. I would guess he still likes to teach and do research, but maybe not as a full-time professor. Adjuncts don't have to go to committee meetings. :-)
  - dgacmu 12y ago
    Yup. In the case of people like Stonebraker -- or Butler Lampson, who's also officially adjunct at MIT -- Think of it as: You get an office, a community, resources with which to do research (and a framework within which to ask for grant/funding if you want), opportunities to advise students, the ability to teach classes when you want. In exchange, you don't get much money -- but also almost zero responsibilities unless you choose to assume them. (source: I'm a CS professor and I got my Ph.D. at MIT while both Stonebraker and Lampson were there.)
- dpritchett 12y ago
  This is what adjuncting is supposed to be for - folks with industry experience moonlight as professors. The benefit is not primarily salary but networking, knowledge sharing, and helping the next generation of industry professionals. Now it's more of a way to have 2/3 or more of the department work for unliveable wages which allows for an ever-growing administrative overhead in colleges while tuitions double every decade.
  - hga 12y ago
    As far as I know, not true at MIT, teaching is done by tenured or tenture track professors, with exceptions like this, or SF author Joe Haldeman, that prove the rule. But, yeah, I hear from lots of sources that adjuncts making peanuts have become the rule rather than the exception in general US academia, and there's no disputing how administrators are taking over higher education, now even desiring to wrest little the faculty still control from them.

reinhardt1053 12y ago

His book "Readings in Database Systems" 4th edition http://www.amazon.com/Readings-Database-Systems-Joseph-Hellerstein/dp/0262693143 http://www.amazon.com/Readings-Database-Systems-Joseph-Helle...

binarymax 12y ago
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.
- nimrody 12y ago
  Could you recommend something more appropriate for someone who would like to explore the world of database implementations?
  - AlisdairO 12y ago
    For an overview of basic concepts in DB implementation, I quite like Database Systems: The Complete Book (By Widom I think...). You could do a lot worse than An Introduction to Database Systems (CJ Date), although many dislike his opinionated style :-). If you're talking about actually implementing a full transactional database system, strong foundational books are: Transaction Processing: Concepts and Techniques (Gray and Reuter) Transactional Information Systems: Theory, Algorithms, and the Practice of Concurrency Control and Recovery (Vossen and Weikum) Neither are exactly easy reading, but the concepts therein are really important.
    - timtadh 12y ago
      +1 on all of those books. If you are interested in multi-dimensional indices (R-Trees, M-Trees, and many more exotic ones). You should checkout "Foundations of Multidimensional and Metric Data Structures" by Hanan Samet. Very comprehensive! "Database Systems: The Complete Book" is fantastic (pick up the previous version it is cheaper!) but it only touches on multidimensional indexing. Also if you are interested in B-Trees start with "The Ubiquitous B-Tree" by Comer. [ http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/356770.356776 http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/356770.356776 ].

makmanalp 12y ago

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 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/ 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 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.

Alex3917 12y ago
Also his YouTube videos are highly worth watching: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=michael+stonebraker https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=michael+stonebr...
- assface 12y ago
  Fun Fact: Stonebraker used to party with Michael Jackson in the early 1980s when Thriller came out: https://youtu.be/LCXWF-OEIkc?t=6m17s https://youtu.be/LCXWF-OEIkc?t=6m17s
  - leonardinius 12y ago
    Fun fact, it's Pete Carter as Michael Jackson https://youtu.be/LCXWF-OEIkc?t=639 https://youtu.be/LCXWF-OEIkc?t=639
    - denzil_correa 12y ago
      He got me there for a moment. Pete Carter also says that Stonebraker wrote lyrics for "Beat It".
  - 12y ago

nmc 12y ago

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:SijAcDvflDMJ:https://newsoffice.mit.edu/2015/michael-stonebraker-wins-turing-award-0325+&cd=1 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:SijAcDv... Google cache in case you have trouble reaching the website (apparently under some understandably heavy load).

gamache 12y ago

newsoffice.mit.edu is not enjoying all this traffic. Article text: http://pastebin.com/MTdagueN http://pastebin.com/MTdagueN

nwatson 12y ago

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-massive.html http://radar.oreilly.com/2008/11/the-commoditization-of-mass... for more context for column-storage and log analysis. edit: link to article.

asah 12y ago
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.

denzil_correa 12y ago

Official Press Release from ACM. http://www.acm.org/press-room/news-releases/2015/turing-award-14/ http://www.acm.org/press-room/news-releases/2015/turing-awar...

arca_vorago 12y ago

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 12y ago
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.
- arca_vorago 12y ago
  I don't disagree, but I think what he is trying to convey is that there are a lot of place where ACID is needed but isn't being put into place. He's not arguing against non-ACID, he's saying people are using non-ACID systems where they shouldn't. It's a small but important distinction.

aetch 12y ago

Cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://newsoffice.mit.edu/2015/michael-stonebraker-wins-turing-award-0325 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/...

aklarfeld 12y ago

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

turingbook 12y ago

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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Stonebraker

ianlee 12y ago
Don't forget his newest company - Tamr! http://www.tamr.com/ http://www.tamr.com/
InternetUser 12y ago
Here are the links to the top info pages for each of the projects you named: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9267844 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9267844

hpvic03 12y ago

The link is broken, change https to http.

dang 12y ago
Thanks. Fixed.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

krat0sprakhar 12y ago

To know more about Professor Stonebraker I cant recommend this excellent interview[0] by se-radio enough. Its easily one of the best interviews that I've heard on a podcast. Do check it out. [0] - http://www.se-radio.net/2013/12/episode-199-michael-stonebraker/ http://www.se-radio.net/2013/12/episode-199-michael-stonebra...

ixtli 12y ago

If he's only an adjunct, I wonder what you need to do to get full professorship at MIT.

hga 12y ago
The desire to put in that sort of work to the exclusion of building things and companies, it would appear in his case. He was a full professor at Berkeley. He's also getting old, past the normal age for a MIT professor to become Emeritus.
sriram_malhar 12y ago
It's his choice to be an adjunct. Butler Lampson is one too.

Adam_O 12y ago

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.

ww520 12y ago

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.

justin66 12y ago

Question about the Turing Award, something I wonder about whenever this comes up: how did Claude Shannon never win it?

pc2g4d 12y ago
Perhaps information theory was viewed as more EE than CS?

niels_olson 12y ago

That's the first Turing winner I've met. Thanks to philg for bringing Professor Stonebraker in for his 3-day database course. http://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/rdbms-iap-2015 http://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/rdbms-iap-2015

CurtMonash 12y ago

Of course, I've been writing about Mike for a while. :) http://www.softwarememories.com/2007/01/21/why-michael-stonebraker-matters/ http://www.softwarememories.com/2007/01/21/why-michael-stone... http://www.dbms2.com/category/michael-stonebraker/ http://www.dbms2.com/category/michael-stonebraker/ Also http://www.monash.com/test-consult.html#stone http://www.monash.com/test-consult.html#stone :)

mkramlich 12y ago

well deserved. congratulations to Mr. Stonebraker (among other things I was part of one of the first early adopter teams that used his Streambase product, while at Orbitz.)

mfisher87 12y ago

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?

jestinjoy1 12y ago

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"

InternetUser 12y ago

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/Ingres_%28database%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illustra https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illustra http://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/analysis/1943302/disparate-databases-rounded-cohera http://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/analysis/1943302/disparate-databas... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StreamBase_Systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StreamBase_Systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertica https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertica https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VoltDB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VoltDB http://www.paradigm4.com/ http://www.paradigm4.com/ http://cs.brown.edu/research/aurora/ http://cs.brown.edu/research/aurora/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-Store https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-Store https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-Store https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-Store http://publications.csail.mit.edu/abstracts/abstracts07/stonebraker-abstract1/stonebraker-abstract1.html http://publications.csail.mit.edu/abstracts/abstracts07/ston... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SciDB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SciDB

findjashua 12y ago

He's the creator of postgres. Enough said!