

Ted Codd wrote his pioneering paper in 1970 that said you should view data management as tables, the simplest possible data structure, and then access them in a high-level language. That’s, well, this was in the early to mid-70s. Prior to this interview, I did not know you and Eugene Wong had created the first relational database, the first working model. And so, there have been, I would say in the last 20 years, a veritable explosion of alternative data management solutions. Whether it’s the scientists who are recording petabytes of experimental data, whether it’s the social media people who are trying to figure out the inflections of people’s social media remarks, whether it’s the English folks who are counting commas or sentence structure, I think essentially everybody has a big data problem.īusiness data processing is pretty much happy with relational databases, but for the entirety of everybody, one size does not fit all. I think when you hear the word big data, what that really means is that essentially everybody has a big data problem. And you stated many times that one size does not fit all. So the ubiquity of the need for data management has come in the last 10 or 15 years.Įxcellent, excellent. Then I think over the next 15 years, it occurred to most everybody that they needed a database system. Relational databases were originally designed with that goal in mind, and that was the only market anyone really saw until around 1990. And the whole goal of data management was to make business databases work better. I mean, the simple answer is that in the 1970s, there was only one database market, basically business data processing.

Just overall, back in the 1970s or even 1980s, did you realize that data would be as important as it’s turning out to be now?Īh, no.

The book was edited by a colleague, Michael Brodie, and he solicited input from lots and lots of people. So, anyway, I like the approach it takes a look at my work from all angles.
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The book was commissioned by ACM, and it’s designed to reflect on why I won the Turing Award. And so, as I won in 2014, my book is actually the first one to come out in what will be a series of books about each Turing Award winner. What does it feel like to have a book published about your life’s work? We spoke with Stonebraker about what factors drove the evolution of database management systems in the past decades and where he sees data management technology developing in the years to come…
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“ Making Databases Work: The Pragmatic Wisdom of Michael Stonebraker,” published in January ($119.95 hardback/$99.95 paperback/$79.96 e-book or free for ACM members), is a compilation of essays from both Stonebraker and others in the field, covering both his work and how it has changed computing. The organization is now commissioning books about each of its award winners, starting with Stonebraker. In 2014, the Association for Computing Machinery bestowed Stonebraker with The Turing Award, ACM ‘s most prestigious technical award, is given for major contributions of lasting importance to computing. Presently he serves as an advisor to VoltDB and chief technology officer of Paradigm4 and Tamr.Ĭurrently, he is an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at MIT, where he is co-director of the Intel Science and Technology Center focused on big data. Even more remarkable, he has kept pace with the database system development in the 40 years since.Īt the University of California at Berkeley, he soon went on to expand on the work on INGRES for an object-relational database management system, Postgres. Later, at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he co-architected the Aurora/Borealis stream processing engine, the C-Store column-oriented DBMS, the H-Store transaction processing engine, which became VoltDB, the SciDB array database management system, and the Data Tamer data curation system.

Michael Stonebraker, who, along with Eugene Wong in 1974, created the first working relational database system, INGRES. When it comes to understanding fundamentals of database systems, there may be better no better person to speak with than Dr.
