Information about Michael Stonebraker

Michael Stonebraker is a computer scientist specializing in database research and development. His career covers, and helped create, the majority of the existing relational database market today. He is also the founder of Ingres, Illustra, Cohera, StreamBase Systems and Vertica and was previously the CTO of Informix. He is also an editor for the book Readings in Database Systems.

Stonebraker earned his bachelor's degree from Princeton University in 1965 and his master's degree and his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1967 and 1971, respectively. He has received several awards, including the IEEE John von Neumann Medal and the very first SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovations Award. In 1994 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.

Michael Stonebraker is currently an adjunct professor at MIT.

Ingres

In 1973 Stonebraker and his colleague Eugene Wong decided to start researching relational database systems after reading a series of seminal papers published by IBM. By the mid-1970s they had produced, using a rotating team of student programmers, a usable system known as Ingres. At the time Ingres was considered "low end" compared to IBM's similar effort, System R, as it ran on Unix-based DEC machines as opposed to the "big iron" IBM mainframes.

However by the early 1980s the performance and capabilities of these low-end machines was seriously threatening IBM's mainframe market, and with it came the ability of Ingres to be a "real" product for a large number of applications. Ingres was offered using a variation of the BSD license for a nominal fee, and soon a number of companies took advantage of this to create commercial versions of Ingres.

This included Stonebraker, who left University of California Berkeley in 1982 to help found Ingres Corporation, which was later sold to Computer Associates and was recently re-established as an independent company in 2005. After the sale in 1984, Stonebraker returned to UC Berkeley.

Postgres

Upon his return he started a "post-ingres" effort to address the limitations of the relational model, naming the new project Postgres. Postgres offered a number of features that effectively made the database "understand" the data inside it, dramatically improving programmability. Postgres was also offered using a BSD-like license, and the code forms the basis of today's free software, PostgreSQL.

Once again Stonebraker left Berkeley in 1992 to commercialize the code, creating Illustra. At first the product seems to have been generally ignored, but a second release in 1995 added a new, unique plug-in system known as DataBlades. The effect on the industry was dramatic, so much so that Illustra was soon purchased by Informix, who folded the code into their flagship product line.

Cohera

In the late 1990s, Mike Stonebraker founded Cohera Software, headquartered in Hayward, California. Cohera's initial mission was to build a federated database, an updated approach to integrating data in multiple database that began with the first attempts at distributed relational databases in the 1980s. The federated database market had not seen significant customer demand by the 1999-2000 time frame, so Cohera was re-focused on delivering industry-specific capabilities on top of the core integration engine. Cohera was ultimately sold in August 2001 to PeopleSoft.

StreamBase

Mike Stonebraker moved to MIT in the late 1990's and set up a project called Aurora ([1] Aurora is about data management for streaming data, using a SQL variant called StreamSQL. StreamBase Systems ([2] is the company he founded to commercialize the technology.

Vertica and C-Store

Another project Stonebraker has been involved in is C-Store, a column-oriented DBMS. The technology is being commercialized by Vertica Systems, which he co-founded and is serving as Chief Technical Officer.

Additional work

On his second return to academia, he initiated the Mariposa project which became the basis of Cohera which was subsequently sold to PeopleSoft.

External links

• Stonebraker's home page at MIT
• Interview with Michael Stonebraker in ACM Queue