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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.was

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".
  - brudgers 12y ago
    Whoever it is, it's not Michael Jackson [1]. http://mcs.open.ac.uk/mj665/ http://mcs.open.ac.uk/mj665/ Whoosh.
- daddykotex 12y ago
  "On what hardware platform does Oracle runs the best?" ... "Extaclty right, on a 35mm projector..." hahaha
- Joeri 12y ago
  I can highly recommend his video "Everything you learned in your DBMS class is wrong" http://slideshot.epfl.ch/play/suri_stonebraker http://slideshot.epfl.ch/play/suri_stonebraker It opened my eyes to why traditional block-based RDBMS's were definitely going to go away and replaced by in-memory engines.
hoopism 12y ago
Also doing some really interesting work @ Tamr. Worth checking out.
batbomb 12y ago
and scidb.
peterfirefly 12y ago
Margo Seltzer is not one of my heroes. There was an "episode" in the 90's where she tried to tell Larry McVoy how to measure systems performance and another where she tried to tell Marshall Kirk McKusick how to write filesystems. She was not exactly nice and her numbers were not exactly correct. She tried to spin it as evil white men oppressing a plucky young feminist who was just trying to get the truth out :( Unfortunately, it didn't seem to hurt her career at all.
- dekhn 12y ago
  I don't know about the episodes you're referring to, but it appears she wrote the log-structured filesystem for BSD (which builds on UFS, that was created by McKusick, a great filesystem for its day, but ultimate needed improvements). Also looks like she founded Sleepycat, and knew a bunch about Berkeley DB, which hammered the filesystem. """She is the author of several widely-used software packages including database and transaction libraries and the 4.4BSD log-structured file system. Dr. Seltzer was a founder and CTO of Sleepycat Software, the makers of Berkeley DB and is now an Architect for Oracle Corporation.""" So, frankly, I think she probably is qualified to tell McVoy (not one of my heros) and McKusick (one of my heros) how to up their game.
  - peterfirefly 12y ago
    I remember Berkeley DB for occasionally corrupting its databases.
    - peterfirefly 12y ago
      Come on, /that/ downvote was unfair. I can grudgingly accept that people downvote me for saying negative things about someone without linking to evidence (that really does exist, I swear!). But Berkeley DB not being robust back in the day shouldn't be controversial at all. It's a simple fact. And look: here's someone who agrees: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3614071 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3614071 (this time it was a lot easier to google)
anonetal 12y ago
Aurora was commercialized as Streambase Systems (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StreamBase_Systems http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StreamBase_Systems), and was a reasonable success as well.

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".
- brudgers 12y ago
  Whoever it is, it's not Michael Jackson [1]. http://mcs.open.ac.uk/mj665/ http://mcs.open.ac.uk/mj665/ Whoosh.
daddykotex 12y ago
"On what hardware platform does Oracle runs the best?" ... "Extaclty right, on a 35mm projector..." hahaha
Joeri 12y ago
I can highly recommend his video "Everything you learned in your DBMS class is wrong" http://slideshot.epfl.ch/play/suri_stonebraker http://slideshot.epfl.ch/play/suri_stonebraker It opened my eyes to why traditional block-based RDBMS's were definitely going to go away and replaced by in-memory engines.

hoopism 12y ago

Also doing some really interesting work @ Tamr. Worth checking out.

batbomb 12y ago

and scidb.

peterfirefly 12y ago

Margo Seltzer is not one of my heroes. There was an "episode" in the 90's where she tried to tell Larry McVoy how to measure systems performance and another where she tried to tell Marshall Kirk McKusick how to write filesystems. She was not exactly nice and her numbers were not exactly correct. She tried to spin it as evil white men oppressing a plucky young feminist who was just trying to get the truth out :( Unfortunately, it didn't seem to hurt her career at all.

dekhn 12y ago
I don't know about the episodes you're referring to, but it appears she wrote the log-structured filesystem for BSD (which builds on UFS, that was created by McKusick, a great filesystem for its day, but ultimate needed improvements). Also looks like she founded Sleepycat, and knew a bunch about Berkeley DB, which hammered the filesystem. """She is the author of several widely-used software packages including database and transaction libraries and the 4.4BSD log-structured file system. Dr. Seltzer was a founder and CTO of Sleepycat Software, the makers of Berkeley DB and is now an Architect for Oracle Corporation.""" So, frankly, I think she probably is qualified to tell McVoy (not one of my heros) and McKusick (one of my heros) how to up their game.
- peterfirefly 12y ago
  I remember Berkeley DB for occasionally corrupting its databases.
  - peterfirefly 12y ago
    Come on, /that/ downvote was unfair. I can grudgingly accept that people downvote me for saying negative things about someone without linking to evidence (that really does exist, I swear!). But Berkeley DB not being robust back in the day shouldn't be controversial at all. It's a simple fact. And look: here's someone who agrees: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3614071 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3614071 (this time it was a lot easier to google)

anonetal 12y ago

Aurora was commercialized as Streambase Systems (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StreamBase_Systems http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StreamBase_Systems), and was a reasonable success as well.