Michael Stonebraker is a computer scientist who, as a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, led the construction of two of the most influential database systems ever built. In the mid-1970s he and Eugene Wong started the Ingres project, and the resulting Berkeley technical report “The Design and Implementation of Ingres” (UCB/ERL M577, 1976), authored with Peter Kreps and Gerald Held, described a working multiuser relational database running on top of Unix on DEC PDP-11 machines.
A decade later Stonebraker turned to a successor. His 1986 paper with Lawrence Rowe, “The Design of POSTGRES,” set out goals for an extensible “object-relational” system that supported complex objects, user-defined data types, and rules and triggers, while changing the relational model as little as possible. Postgres became the ancestor of today’s PostgreSQL.
Concepts first proven in Ingres and Postgres — both built on Unix and released as open software — went on to appear in nearly every major database system. Over a long career Stonebraker also helped start a string of later systems and companies, including work on column-store and in-memory designs.
In 2014 he received the ACM A.M. Turing Award, computing’s highest honor, “for fundamental contributions to the concepts and practices underlying modern database systems.”