
Michael Stonebraker wins Turing Award - assface
http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2015/michael-stonebraker-wins-turing-award-0325
======
turingbook
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
Don't forget his newest company - Tamr!
[http://www.tamr.com/](http://www.tamr.com/)

------
makmanalp
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
Also his YouTube videos are highly worth watching:

[https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=michael+stonebr...](https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=michael+stonebraker)

~~~
assface
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
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
He got me there for a moment. Pete Carter also says that Stonebraker wrote
lyrics for "Beat It".

------
arca_vorago
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
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
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.

------
binarymax
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!

~~~
a3n
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?

~~~
dpritchett
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.

~~~
sitkack
Management in all organizations should be automated by AI, with copious
amounts of override buttons sprinkled throughout.

Education administration is a like a thorn stuck in my mind, they make _more_
than everyone else and for the most part only act as a gas to support their
own structure.

~~~
a3n
This is how every bureaucracy works, whether government, commercial or
academic. Once the institution has enough income/cash flow for momentum, then
it attract people who are expert at operating the machine itself, rather than
expert in what the machine is supposed to be accomplishing. After the first
one lands, they continue to accrete.

It's hard to recognize when it starts, but you'll know it's happened once you
see a lot of people who are not connected with the apparent goal of the
machine, and there are posters all over the place touting whatever programs
the administrators have created to justify their existence, as well as
packaged training programs from motivational/educational consultants (think
Franklin Covey).

~~~
sitkack
Ha, A fork bomb of Agent Smith crossed with Nancy in Program Outreach.

The accretion or calcification model of bureaucratic formation is compelling,
something like how a coral reef grows. The randomized surface provides eddies
and pockets of protection for other life to flourish, RFPs and SBIRs can
nestle in a protected arena with low local competition.

I just realized that large, messy codebases also follow the reef model of
bureaucracy. Hadoop is like that coral reef, providing nooks and crannies for
optimizations and integrations to take hold. I used to imagine Hadoop as Whale
fall [0], but it is more of a mandlebulb. Had Hadoop not provided such a rich
environment the secondary ecosystem wouldn't be as vibrant. Fail to Win?

I find management structures fascinating. Whenever I interact with one I probe
it to see how much autonomy each individual in it has, what rules they can
bend or not follow. Once the agents participating in the bureaucracy cannot
bend the rules I think it will tend towards dystopia. Maybe 1984 isn't a
warning against fascism, but the natural tendency of all bureaucracies to only
support them selves.

[0]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whale_fall](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whale_fall)

note: I might sound like the stereo type of a hackernews-bitcoin-libertarian,
but I assure you my politics are much more nuanced than that. I don't think
that bureaucracy as a structure is bad, but it needs to be managed with
something akin to the voting logic in a triple redundant control circuit [1]
[2]. Most bureaucracies exist within a positive feedback loop, which rewards
them for growth instead of efficiency. It is like getting paid by LOC instead
of 1/LOC or 1/runtime.

[1]
ftp://ftp.unicauca.edu.co/Facultades/FIET/DEIC/Materias/Instrumentacion%20Industrial/Instrument_Engineers__Handbook_-
_Process_Measurement_and_Analysis/Instrument%20Engineers'%20Handbook%20-%20Process%20Measurement%20and%20Analysis/1083ch1_10.pdf

[2]
[http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/1985002...](http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19850021660.pdf)

------
krat0sprakhar
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-
stonebra...](http://www.se-radio.net/2013/12/episode-199-michael-stonebraker/)

------
CurtMonash
Of course, I've been writing about Mike for a while. :)

[http://www.softwarememories.com/2007/01/21/why-michael-
stone...](http://www.softwarememories.com/2007/01/21/why-michael-stonebraker-
matters/) [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) :)

------
aklarfeld
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

------
nmc
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:SijAcDv...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:SijAcDvflDMJ:https://newsoffice.mit.edu/2015/michael-
stonebraker-wins-turing-award-0325+&cd=1)

Google cache in case you have trouble reaching the website (apparently under
some understandably heavy load).

------
nwatson
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-
mass...](http://radar.oreilly.com/2008/11/the-commoditization-of-massive.html)
for more context for column-storage and log analysis.

edit: link to article.

~~~
asah
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.

------
gamache
newsoffice.mit.edu is not enjoying all this traffic.

Article text: [http://pastebin.com/MTdagueN](http://pastebin.com/MTdagueN)

------
InternetUser
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-
databas...](http://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/analysis/1943302/disparate-databases-
rounded-cohera)

[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/ston...](http://publications.csail.mit.edu/abstracts/abstracts07/stonebraker-
abstract1/stonebraker-abstract1.html)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SciDB](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SciDB)

------
niels_olson
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)

------
reinhardt1053
His book "Readings in Database Systems" 4th edition
[http://www.amazon.com/Readings-Database-Systems-Joseph-
Helle...](http://www.amazon.com/Readings-Database-Systems-Joseph-
Hellerstein/dp/0262693143)

~~~
binarymax
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
Could you recommend something more appropriate for someone who would like to
explore the world of database implementations?

~~~
AlisdairO
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
+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)
].

------
denzil_correa
Official Press Release from ACM.

[http://www.acm.org/press-room/news-releases/2015/turing-
awar...](http://www.acm.org/press-room/news-releases/2015/turing-award-14/)

------
Adam_O
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.

------
jestinjoy1
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"

------
mfisher87
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?

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

------
ww520
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
Question about the Turing Award, something I wonder about whenever this comes
up: how did Claude Shannon never win it?

~~~
pc2g4d
Perhaps information theory was viewed as more EE than CS?

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

~~~
hga
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.

------
mkramlich
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.)

------
findjashua
He's the creator of postgres. Enough said!

------
hpvic03
The link is broken, change https to http.

~~~
dang
Thanks. Fixed.

