Michael Ralph Stonebraker (born October 11, 1943^[6]) is an Americancomputer scientist specializing indatabase systems. Through a series of academic prototypes and commercial startups, Stonebraker's research and products are central to manyrelational databases. He is also the founder of many database companies, includingIngres Corporation,Illustra, Paradigm4,StreamBase Systems,Tamr,Vertica andVoltDB, and served aschief technical officer ofInformix. For his contributions to database research, Stonebraker received the 2014Turing Award, often described as "the Nobel Prize for computing."^[7]

Michael Stonebraker
Michael Stonebraker giving the 2015 Turing lecture
Born	(1943-10-11)October 11, 1943 (age 81) Newburyport, Massachusetts, U.S.[5]
Alma mater	Princeton University (BSE) University of Michigan (MS,PhD)
Known for	Ingres,Postgres,Vertica,Streambase,Illustra,VoltDB,SciDB
Spouse	Beth
Awards	IEEE John von Neumann Medal(2005) ACM Turing Award(2014)
Scientific career
Fields	Computer science
Institutions	University of California, Berkeley University of Michigan Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Thesis	The Reduction of Large Scale Markov Models for Random Chains
Doctoral advisor	Arch Waugh Naylor
Notable students	Joseph M. Hellerstein Clifford A. Lynch[1] Margo Seltzer[1] Dale Skeen[2] Marti Hearst[3] Leilani Battle[4]
Website	csail.mit.edu/user/1547

Stonebraker's career can be broadly divided into two phases: his time atUniversity of California, Berkeley when he focused onrelational database management systems such asIngres andPostgres, and, starting in 2001, atMassachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where he developed more novel data management techniques such asC-Store,H-Store,SciDB andDBOS.^[8] Stonebraker is currently a professor emeritus at UC Berkeley and an adjunct professor at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.^[9][10] He is also known as an editor for the bookReadings in Database Systems.

Stonebraker grew up inMilton, New Hampshire.^[11] He earned his B.S.E. inelectrical engineering fromPrinceton University in 1965, and hisM.S. andPh.D. from theUniversity of Michigan in 1967 and 1971^[12] respectively. His awards include theIEEE John von Neumann Medal and the firstSIGMODEdgar F. Codd Innovations Award. In 1994 he was inducted as aFellow of theAssociation for Computing Machinery.^[13] In 1997, he was elected a member of theNational Academy of Engineering for the development and commercialization of relational and object-relational database systems. In March 2015 it was announced he won the 2014ACM Turing Award.^[7] In September 2015, he won the 2015 Commonwealth Award, chosen by council members of MassTLC.^[14]

Stonebraker joinedUniversity of California, Berkeley, as an assistant professor in 1971, and taught in the computer science department for twenty-nine years. It was there that he did his early pioneering work on relational databases.

In 1973, Stonebraker and his colleagueEugene Wong started researching relational database systems after reading a series of seminal papers published byEdgar F. Codd on therelational data model.^[15]

Their project, known asIngres (Interactive Graphics and Retrieval System),^[16] was one of the first systems (along withSystem R fromIBM) todemonstrate that it was possible to build a practical and efficient implementation of the relational model. A number of key ideas from INGRES are still widely used in relational systems, including the use ofB-trees, primary-copy replication, the query rewrite approach to views andintegrity constraints, and the idea of rules/triggers for integrity checking in an RDBMS. Additionally, much experimental work was done that provided insights into how to build a locking system that could provide satisfactory transaction performance.^[17]

By the mid-1970s, Stonebraker's team produced, using a rotating team of student programmers, a usable relational database system. At the time Ingres was considered "low end" compared to IBM's System R, as it ran onUnix-basedDigital Equipment Corporation machines as opposed to the "big iron"IBM mainframes.^{[citation needed]}

By the early 1980s, however, the performance and capabilities of these low-end machines were seriously threatening IBM's mainframe market, and with the threat came the ability of Ingres to become a viable, "real" product for a large number of applications. Ingres used a variation of theBSD license for a nominal fee, and soon a number of companies took advantage of this to create commercial versions of Ingres.^{[citation needed]}

These included Stonebraker, who with fellow Berkeley professors Larry Rowe and Eugene Wong helped foundRelational Technology, Inc., later called Ingres Corporation. Subsequently, sold toComputer Associates, Ingres was re-established as an independent company in 2005, and later renamedActian. Other startups based on Ingres includeSybase, founded by Robert Epstein, a student on the project, andBritton Lee, Inc. Sybase's code was later used as a basis forMicrosoft SQL Server.^[18]

After founding Relational Technology, Stonebraker and Rowe began a "post-Ingres" effort, to address the limitations of the relational model. The new project was namedPOSTGRES (POST inGRES),^[19] and was designed to add support for complex data types to database systems and improve end-to-end performance of data-intensive applications. Postgres provided anobject relational programming model in which fields could be complex datatypes, and where users could register new types as well as scalar and aggregate functions over those types. Postgres was extensible in a number of other ways, making it easy for programmers to modify or add to the optimizer, query language, runtime, and indexing frameworks. These features improved both database programmability and performance, and made it possible to push large portions of a number of applications inside the database, includinggeographic information systems andtime series processing. This had the effect of substantially broadening the commercial database market.^{[citation needed]}

Postgres was also offered using a BSD-like license, and the code forms the basis of thefree software,PostgreSQL. Stonebraker also led an effort to commercialize the code, creatingIllustra which was purchased byInformix. PostgreSQL has been used as the basis for a number of other startup companies, includingAster Data Systems,EnterpriseDB, andGreenplum.^{[citation needed]}

Informix acquired Illustra in 1996, and Stonebraker became Informix's CTO, a position he held until September 2000. Informix integrated Illustra's O–R mapping andDataBlades into the 7.x OnLine product, resulting in Informix Universal Server (IUS), or more generally, Version 9.^{[citation needed]}

After the Postgres project, Stonebraker initiated the Mariposa^[20] project which became the basis of Cohera Corporation. Mariposa built afederated database over an economic model of resource trading, in which data distributed across multiple organizations could be integrated and queried from a single relational interface, governed by site-specific policies that would charge for data processing and storage. These economic policies allowed traditional ideas inquery optimization to be carried out over competing sites, and also served as the basis for data storage, replication and movement within a federation.

Cohera's initial mission was to commercialize Mariposa, but eventually focused on a business-to-business catalog management application on the core federated data integration engine. Cohera's intellectual property was purchased byPeopleSoft in 2001,and used as the basis of PeopleSoft's Enterprise Catalog Management. PeopleSoft was in turn purchased byOracle Corporation in 2004.^{[citation needed]}

Stonebraker became an adjunct professor atMIT in 2001, where he began another series of research projects and founded a number of companies.

In the Aurora Project, Stonebraker, along with colleagues fromBrandeis University,Brown University, and MIT, focused on data management for streaming data, using a new data model and query language. Unlike relational systems, which "pull" data and process it a record at a time, in Aurora, data is "pushed", arriving asynchronously from external data sources (such as stock ticks, news feeds, or sensors.) The output is itself a stream of results (such as windowed averages) that are sent to users.^[21]

Stonebraker co-foundedStreamBase Systems in 2003 to commercialize the technology behind Aurora.

In theC-Store project, started in 2005, Stonebraker, along with colleagues from Brandeis, Brown, MIT, andUniversity of Massachusetts Boston, developed a parallel,shared-nothingcolumn-oriented DBMS for data warehousing. By dividing and storing data in columns, C-Store is able to perform less I/O and get better compression ratios than conventional database systems that store data in rows.^[22]

Stonebraker explained that it's because similar data items are side-by-side: Name,Name,Name,Name vs. Name,Address,Zip,Phone#. In 2005, Stonebraker co-foundedVertica to commercialize the technology behind C-Store.^[23]

In 2006, Stonebraker started the Morpheus project, along with researchers from the University of Florida. Morpheus is adata integration system which relies on a collection of "transforms" tomediate between data sources. Each transform provides a queryable interface to particular web site or service, and Morpheus makes it possible to search for and compose multiple transforms to provide a new service or a unified view of several services.

In 2009, Stonebraker co-founded Goby,^[24] alocal search company based on ideas from Morpheus, for people to explore new things to do in free time.

In 2007, with researchers fromBrown University,MIT, andYale University, Stonebraker started theH-Store project. H-Store is a distributed main-memoryonline transaction processing (OLTP) system designed to provide very high throughput on transaction processing workloads.

In 2009, Stonebraker co-founded, and then served as an adviser to,VoltDB a commercial startup based on ideas from the H-Store project.

In 2008, along withDavid DeWitt and researchers from Brown, MIT,Portland State University,SLAC, theUniversity of Washington, and theUniversity of Wisconsin–Madison, Stonebraker startedSciDB^[25][26] an open-source DBMS specially designed for scientific research applications.^[27]

He founded Paradigm4 with Marilyn Matz, who became CEO. Paradigm4 developed SciDB, used mostly by life sciences and financial markets.Novartis,Foundation Medicine, and theNational Institutes of Health are some of the company's clients.^[14][28]

In 2010 and 2011, Stonebraker criticized theNoSQL movement.^[29][30][31]

Stonebraker trained more than 30 students,^[2] including:

• Daniel Abadi, co-founder of Hadapt (acquired byTeradata)
• Michael J. Carey, professor at UC Irvine
• Paula Hawthorn, co-founder of Britton Lee
• Marti Hearst, professor at UC Berkeley
• Joseph M. Hellerstein, professor at UC Berkeley
• Clifford A. Lynch, executive director of theCoalition for Networked Information
• Margo Seltzer, professor at theUniversity of British Columbia, founder and former CTO ofSleepycat Software
• Dale Skeen, founder and CEO of Vitria
• Sunita Sarawagi, professor at IIT Bombay

• Joseph M. Hellerstein; Michael Stonebraker (2015).Readings in Database Systems (5th ed.). MIT Press.
• Michael Stonebraker;Randy Katz,David Patterson,John Ousterhout (1988)."THE DESIGN OF XPRS"(PDF).VLDB:318–330. Retrieved25 March 2015.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)

• "Michael Stonebraker". Berkeley, CA, USA: University of California. 1995-12-23. Retrieved2009-07-14.
• "Michael Stonebraker".User Profiles. MA, USA: MIT. 2009-07-09. Retrieved2009-07-14.
• Monash, Curt,"Michael Stonebraker",DBMS2, a series of recent interviews and comments about and by Stonebraker.
• "Morpheus: A Data Integration Toolkit".CSAIL Research Abstracts. MA, USA: MIT. Archived fromthe original on 2010-06-16. Retrieved2009-11-22.
• Goby, a new search engine to find fun things to do in one's free time (co-founded by Stonebraker)
• Database pioneer Stonebraker rocks $1M "Nobel Prize in Computing", 2015-03-25