Michael Stonebraker
Encyclopedia
Michael Ralph Stonebraker (born October 11, 1943) is a computer scientist
specializing in database research.
Through a series of academic prototypes and commercial startups, Stonebraker's research and products are central to many relational database
systems on the market today. He is also the founder of a number of database companies, including Ingres, Illustra
, Cohera, StreamBase Systems
, Vertica
, VoltDB
, and Paradigm4. He 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 first SIGMOD
Edgar F. Codd
Innovations Award. In 1994 he was inducted as a Fellow
of the Association for Computing Machinery
. In 1997 he was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering
.
Michael Stonebraker was a Professor of Computer Science at University of California, Berkeley
, for twenty nine years, where he developed the Ingres and Postgres relational database systems. He is currently an adjunct professor at MIT
, where he has been involved in the development of the Aurora, C-Store
, H-Store
, Morpheus, and SciDB systems.
on the relational data model
.
Their project, known as INGRES (Interactive Graphics and Retrieval System), was one of the first systems (along with System R
from IBM) to
demonstrate 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 today, including the use of B-trees, primary-copy replication, the query rewrite approach to views and integrity 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.
By the mid-1970s Stonebraker's team had 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 on Unix
-based DEC
machines as opposed to the "big iron
" IBM mainframe
s.
However by the early 1980s the performance and capabilities of these low-end machines was seriously threatening IBM's mainframe market, and with the threat came the ability of INGRES to become 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.
These included Stonebraker, who with fellow Berkeley professors Larry Rowe and Eugene Wong helped found Relational Technology, Inc., later called Ingres Corporation. Subsequently sold to Computer Associates, Ingres was re-established as an independent company in 2005. Other startups based on the INGRES code line include Sybase
, founded by Robert Epstein, a student on the INGRES project, and Britton Lee, Inc.
Sybase
's code was later used as a basis for Microsoft SQL Server
.
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, including geographic information systems and time series processing
. This had the effect of substantially broadening the commercial database market.
POSTGRES was also offered using a BSD-like license, and the code forms the basis of today's free software
, PostgreSQL
.
Stonebraker also led an effort to commercialize the code, creating Illustra which was purchased by Informix
. PostgreSQL has been used as the basis for a number of other startup companies, including Aster Data Systems
, EnterpriseDB
, and Greenplum
.
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 and DataBlade
s into the 7.x OnLine product, resulting in Informix Universal Server (IUS), or more generally, Version 9.
project which became the basis of Cohera Corporation. The main idea behind Mariposa was to build a federated 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 in query 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 ideas from the Mariposa project, but eventually focused on a Business-to-Business Catalog Management application implemented on top of the core federated data integration engine. Cohera's intellectual property was purchased by PeopleSoft
in 2001,
and used as the basis of PeopleSoft's Enterprise Catalog Management. PeopleSoft was in turn purchased by Oracle
in 2004.
, 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.
Stonebraker co-founded StreamBase Systems
in 2003 to commercialize the technology behind Aurora.
project, started in 2005, Stonebraker, along with colleagues from Brandeis University
, Brown University
, MIT, and University of Massachusetts Boston
, developed a parallel, shared-nothing column-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.
In 2005, Stonebraker co-founded Vertica
to commercialize the technology behind C-Store.
system which relies on a collection of "transforms" to mediate 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, a local search
company based on ideas from Morpheus, for people to explore new things to do in free time.
H-Store
In 2007, with researchers from Brown University
, MIT, and Yale University
, Stonebraker started the H-Store project. H-Store
is a distributed main-memory OLTP
system designed to provide very high throughput on transaction processing workloads.
In 2009, Stonebraker co-founded, and currently serves as CTO of VoltDB
, a commercial startup based on ideas from the H-Store
project.
and researchers from Brown University
, MIT, Portland State University
, SLAC, the University of Washington
, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Stonebraker started SciDB, an open-source DBMS specially designed for scientific research applications.
movement.
Computer scientist
A computer scientist is a scientist who has acquired knowledge of computer science, the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and their application in computer systems....
specializing in database research.
Through a series of academic prototypes and commercial startups, Stonebraker's research and products are central to many relational database
Relational database
A relational database is a database that conforms to relational model theory. The software used in a relational database is called a relational database management system . Colloquial use of the term "relational database" may refer to the RDBMS software, or the relational database itself...
systems on the market today. He is also the founder of a number of database companies, including Ingres, Illustra
Illustra
Illustra was a commercialized version of the Postgres object-relational database management system sold by Illustra Information Technologies, a company formed by Michael Stonebraker and Gary Morgenthaler and several of Michael Stonebraker's current and former students including: Wei Hong, Jeff...
, Cohera, StreamBase Systems
StreamBase Systems
StreamBase Systems is a software company based in Lexington, MA, USA. StreamBase was founded in 2003 to commercialize a project called Aurora set up by Mike Stonebraker at MIT, in conjunction with researchers from Brandeis University and Brown University...
, Vertica
Vertica
Vertica Systems is an analytic database management software company. Vertica was founded in 2005 by database researcher Michael Stonebraker, and Andrew Palmer; its President and CEO is Christopher P. Lynch. HP announced it would acquire the company in February 2011. On March 22, 2011, HP completed...
, VoltDB
VoltDB
VoltDB is an in-memory database designed by several well-known database system researchers, including Michael Stonebraker , Sam Madden, and Daniel Abadi. It is an ACID-compliant RDBMS which uses a shared nothing architecture. It includes both enterprise and community editions...
, and Paradigm4. He was previously the CTO
Chief technical officer
A chief technology officer is an executive-level position in a company or other entity whose occupant is focused on scientific and technological issues within an organization....
of Informix
Informix
IBM Informix is a family of relational database management system developed by IBM. It is positioned as IBM's flagship data server for online transaction processing as well as integrated solutions...
. He is also an editor for the book Readings in Database Systems.
Stonebraker earned his bachelor's degree
Bachelor's degree
A bachelor's degree is usually an academic degree awarded for an undergraduate course or major that generally lasts for three or four years, but can range anywhere from two to six years depending on the region of the world...
from Princeton University
Princeton University
Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....
in 1965 and his master's degree
Master's degree
A master's is an academic degree granted to individuals who have undergone study demonstrating a mastery or high-order overview of a specific field of study or area of professional practice...
and his Ph.D.
Doctor of Philosophy
Doctor of Philosophy, abbreviated as Ph.D., PhD, D.Phil., or DPhil , in English-speaking countries, is a postgraduate academic degree awarded by universities...
from the University of Michigan
University of Michigan
The University of Michigan is a public research university located in Ann Arbor, Michigan in the United States. It is the state's oldest university and the flagship campus of the University of Michigan...
in 1967 and 1971, respectively. He has received several awards, including the IEEE John von Neumann Medal
IEEE John von Neumann Medal
The IEEE John von Neumann Medal was established by the IEEE Board of Directors in 1990 and may be presented annually "for outstanding achievements in computer-related science and technology." The achievements may be theoretical, technological, or entrepreneurial, and need not have been made...
and the first SIGMOD
SIGMOD
SIGMOD is the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Management of Data, which specializes in large-scale data management problems and databases....
Edgar F. Codd
Edgar F. Codd
Edgar Frank "Ted" Codd was an English computer scientist who, while working for IBM, invented the relational model for database management, the theoretical basis for relational databases...
Innovations Award. In 1994 he was inducted as a Fellow
Fellow
A fellow in the broadest sense is someone who is an equal or a comrade. The term fellow is also used to describe a person, particularly by those in the upper social classes. It is most often used in an academic context: a fellow is often part of an elite group of learned people who are awarded...
of the Association for Computing Machinery
Association for Computing Machinery
The Association for Computing Machinery is a learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 as the world's first scientific and educational computing society. Its membership is more than 92,000 as of 2009...
. In 1997 he was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering
National Academy of Engineering
The National Academy of Engineering is a government-created non-profit institution in the United States, that was founded in 1964 under the same congressional act that led to the founding of the National Academy of Sciences...
.
Michael Stonebraker was a Professor of Computer Science at University of California, Berkeley
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...
, for twenty nine years, where he developed the Ingres and Postgres relational database systems. He is currently an adjunct professor at MIT
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...
, where he has been involved in the development of the Aurora, C-Store
C-Store
C-Store was a database management system based on a column-oriented DBMS developed by a team at Brown University, Brandeis University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, including Michael Stonebraker, Stanley Zdonik, and Samuel Madden ....
, H-Store
H-Store
H-Store is an experimental database management system designed for online transaction processing applications that is being developed by a team at Brown University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Yale University....
, Morpheus, and SciDB systems.
Major projects
Stonebraker's career can be broadly divided into two phases; his time at Berkeley when he focused on relational systems, and the past decade at MIT where he has developed several new data management systems.The Berkeley years (1971–2000)
Stonebraker joined UC Berkeley as an assistant professor in 1971. It was there that he did his early pioneering work on relational databases in the Ingres and Postgres projects.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 Edgar F. CoddEdgar F. Codd
Edgar Frank "Ted" Codd was an English computer scientist who, while working for IBM, invented the relational model for database management, the theoretical basis for relational databases...
on the relational data model
Relational model
The relational model for database management is a database model based on first-order predicate logic, first formulated and proposed in 1969 by Edgar F...
.
Their project, known as INGRES (Interactive Graphics and Retrieval System), was one of the first systems (along with System R
System R
IBM System R is a database system built as a research project at IBM San Jose Research in the 1970s. System R was a seminal project: it was a precursor of SQL, which has since become the standard relational data query language...
from IBM) to
demonstrate 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 today, including the use of B-trees, primary-copy replication, the query rewrite approach to views and integrity constraints
Integrity constraints
Integrity constraints are used to ensure accuracy and consistency of data in a relational database. Data integrity is handled in a relational database through the concept of referential integrity...
, 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.
By the mid-1970s Stonebraker's team had 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 on Unix
Unix
Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...
-based DEC
Digital Equipment Corporation
Digital Equipment Corporation was a major American company in the computer industry and a leading vendor of computer systems, software and peripherals from the 1960s to the 1990s...
machines as opposed to the "big iron
Big iron
Big iron, as the hacker's dictionary the Jargon File defines it, "refers to large, expensive, ultra-fast computers. It is used generally for number crunching supercomputers such as Crays, but can include more conventional big commercial IBM mainframes"....
" IBM mainframe
IBM mainframe
IBM mainframes are large computer systems produced by IBM from 1952 to the present. During the 1960s and 1970s, the term mainframe computer was almost synonymous with IBM products due to their marketshare...
s.
However by the early 1980s the performance and capabilities of these low-end machines was seriously threatening IBM's mainframe market, and with the threat came the ability of INGRES to become 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.
These included Stonebraker, who with fellow Berkeley professors Larry Rowe and Eugene Wong helped found Relational Technology, Inc., later called Ingres Corporation. Subsequently sold to Computer Associates, Ingres was re-established as an independent company in 2005. Other startups based on the INGRES code line include Sybase
Sybase
Sybase, an SAP company, is an enterprise software and services company offering software to manage, analyze, and mobilize information, using relational databases, analytics and data warehousing solutions and mobile applications development platforms....
, founded by Robert Epstein, a student on the INGRES project, and Britton Lee, Inc.
Britton Lee, Inc.
Britton Lee Inc. was a pioneering relational database company. Renamed ShareBase, it was acquired by Teradata in June, 1990.-History:Britton Lee was founded in 1979 by David L. Britton, Geoffrey M...
Sybase
Sybase
Sybase, an SAP company, is an enterprise software and services company offering software to manage, analyze, and mobilize information, using relational databases, analytics and data warehousing solutions and mobile applications development platforms....
's code was later used as a basis for Microsoft SQL Server
Microsoft SQL Server
Microsoft SQL Server is a relational database server, developed by Microsoft: It is a software product whose primary function is to store and retrieve data as requested by other software applications, be it those on the same computer or those running on another computer across a network...
.
Postgres
After founding Relational Technology, Stonebraker and Rowe began a "post-INGRES" effort, to address the limitations of the relational model. The new project was named POSTGRES (POST inGRES), 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 an object relationalObject-relational database
An object-relational database , or object-relational database management system , is a database management system similar to a relational database, but with an object-oriented database model: objects, classes and inheritance are directly supported in database schemas and in the query language...
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, including geographic information systems and time series processing
Time series
In statistics, signal processing, econometrics and mathematical finance, a time series is a sequence of data points, measured typically at successive times spaced at uniform time intervals. Examples of time series are the daily closing value of the Dow Jones index or the annual flow volume of the...
. This had the effect of substantially broadening the commercial database market.
POSTGRES was also offered using a BSD-like license, and the code forms the basis of today's free software
Free software
Free software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions that only ensure that further recipients can also do...
, PostgreSQL
PostgreSQL
PostgreSQL, often simply Postgres, is an object-relational database management system available for many platforms including Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, MS Windows and Mac OS X. It is released under the PostgreSQL License, which is an MIT-style license, and is thus free and open source software...
.
Stonebraker also led an effort to commercialize the code, creating Illustra which was purchased by Informix
Informix
IBM Informix is a family of relational database management system developed by IBM. It is positioned as IBM's flagship data server for online transaction processing as well as integrated solutions...
. PostgreSQL has been used as the basis for a number of other startup companies, including Aster Data Systems
Aster Data Systems
Aster Data Systems is a data management and analysis software company headquartered in San Carlos, California. It was founded in 2005 and acquired in 2011.-Products:...
, EnterpriseDB
EnterpriseDB
EnterpriseDB is a privately held company that provides enterprise class support for PostgreSQL through its product Postgres Plus Standard Server, which is PostgreSQL with extra bundled modules...
, and Greenplum
Greenplum
Greenplum is a database software company in San Mateo, California, specializing in enterprise data cloud solutions for large-scale data warehousing and analytics...
.
Informix
Informix
IBM Informix is a family of relational database management system developed by IBM. It is positioned as IBM's flagship data server for online transaction processing as well as integrated solutions...
acquired Illustra in 1996, and Stonebraker became Informix's CTO, a position he held until September 2000.
Informix
Informix
IBM Informix is a family of relational database management system developed by IBM. It is positioned as IBM's flagship data server for online transaction processing as well as integrated solutions...
integrated Illustra's O-R mapping and DataBlade
DataBlade
A DataBlade is a module for the IBM Informix database server. Released in 1996, it allows creating complex, custom datatypes whilst providing the same level of integration as built-in datatypes.-External links:*...
s into the 7.x OnLine product, resulting in Informix Universal Server (IUS), or more generally, Version 9.
Mariposa and Cohera
After the Postgres project, Stonebraker initiated the MariposaMariposa (database)
Mariposa was a relational database research project run by Michael Stonebraker at UC Berkeley. Mariposa focused on creating wide-area distributed databases using an economic model in which querying servers "buy" data from data servers which "sell" it...
project which became the basis of Cohera Corporation. The main idea behind Mariposa was to build a federated 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 in query optimization
Query optimization
Query optimization is a function of many relational database management systems in which multiple query plans for satisfying a query are examined and a good query plan is identified. This may or not be the absolute best strategy because there are many ways of doing plans. There is a trade-off...
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 ideas from the Mariposa project, but eventually focused on a Business-to-Business Catalog Management application implemented on top of the core federated data integration engine. Cohera's intellectual property was purchased by PeopleSoft
PeopleSoft
PeopleSoft, Inc. was a company that provided Human Resource Management Systems , Financial Management Solutions , Supply Chain and customer relationship management software, as well as software solutions for manufacturing, enterprise performance management, and student administration to large...
in 2001,
and used as the basis of PeopleSoft's Enterprise Catalog Management. PeopleSoft was in turn purchased by Oracle
Oracle Corporation
Oracle Corporation is an American multinational computer technology corporation that specializes in developing and marketing hardware systems and enterprise software products – particularly database management systems...
in 2004.
The MIT years (2001–Present)
Stonebraker moved to MIT in 2001, where he began another series of research projects and founded a number of companies.Aurora and StreamBase
In the Aurora Project, Stonebraker, along with colleagues from Brandeis UniversityBrandeis University
Brandeis University is an American private research university with a liberal arts focus. It is located in the southwestern corner of Waltham, Massachusetts, nine miles west of Boston. The University has an enrollment of approximately 3,200 undergraduate and 2,100 graduate students. In 2011, it...
, Brown University
Brown University
Brown University is a private, Ivy League university located in Providence, Rhode Island, United States. Founded in 1764 prior to American independence from the British Empire as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations early in the reign of King George III ,...
, 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.
Stonebraker co-founded StreamBase Systems
StreamBase Systems
StreamBase Systems is a software company based in Lexington, MA, USA. StreamBase was founded in 2003 to commercialize a project called Aurora set up by Mike Stonebraker at MIT, in conjunction with researchers from Brandeis University and Brown University...
in 2003 to commercialize the technology behind Aurora.
C-Store and Vertica
In the C-StoreC-Store
C-Store was a database management system based on a column-oriented DBMS developed by a team at Brown University, Brandeis University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, including Michael Stonebraker, Stanley Zdonik, and Samuel Madden ....
project, started in 2005, Stonebraker, along with colleagues from Brandeis University
Brandeis University
Brandeis University is an American private research university with a liberal arts focus. It is located in the southwestern corner of Waltham, Massachusetts, nine miles west of Boston. The University has an enrollment of approximately 3,200 undergraduate and 2,100 graduate students. In 2011, it...
, Brown University
Brown University
Brown University is a private, Ivy League university located in Providence, Rhode Island, United States. Founded in 1764 prior to American independence from the British Empire as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations early in the reign of King George III ,...
, MIT, and University of Massachusetts Boston
University of Massachusetts Boston
The University of Massachusetts Boston, also known as UMass Boston, is an urban public research university and the second largest campus in the five-campus University of Massachusetts system. The university is located on on Harbor Point in the City of Boston, Massachusetts, United States...
, developed a parallel, shared-nothing column-oriented DBMS
Column-oriented DBMS
A column-oriented DBMS is a database management system that stores its content by column rather than by row. This has advantages for data warehouses and library catalogues where aggregates are computed over large numbers of similar data items....
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.
In 2005, Stonebraker co-founded Vertica
Vertica
Vertica Systems is an analytic database management software company. Vertica was founded in 2005 by database researcher Michael Stonebraker, and Andrew Palmer; its President and CEO is Christopher P. Lynch. HP announced it would acquire the company in February 2011. On March 22, 2011, HP completed...
to commercialize the technology behind C-Store.
Morpheus and Goby
In 2006, Stonebraker started the Morpheus project, along with researchers from the University of Florida. Morpheus is a data integrationData integration
Data integration involves combining data residing in different sources and providing users with a unified view of these data.This process becomes significant in a variety of situations, which include both commercial and scientific domains...
system which relies on a collection of "transforms" to mediate 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, a local search
Local search (Internet)
Local search is the use of specialized Internet search engines that allow users to submit geographically constrained searches against a structured database of local business listings...
company based on ideas from Morpheus, for people to explore new things to do in free time.
H-StoreH-StoreH-Store is an experimental database management system designed for online transaction processing applications that is being developed by a team at Brown University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Yale University....
and VoltDB
In 2007, with researchers from Brown UniversityBrown University
Brown University is a private, Ivy League university located in Providence, Rhode Island, United States. Founded in 1764 prior to American independence from the British Empire as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations early in the reign of King George III ,...
, MIT, and Yale University
Yale University
Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...
, Stonebraker started the H-Store project. H-Store
H-Store
H-Store is an experimental database management system designed for online transaction processing applications that is being developed by a team at Brown University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Yale University....
is a distributed main-memory OLTP
Online transaction processing
Online transaction processing, or OLTP, refers to a class of systems that facilitate and manage transaction-oriented applications, typically for data entry and retrieval transaction processing...
system designed to provide very high throughput on transaction processing workloads.
In 2009, Stonebraker co-founded, and currently serves as CTO of VoltDB
VoltDB
VoltDB is an in-memory database designed by several well-known database system researchers, including Michael Stonebraker , Sam Madden, and Daniel Abadi. It is an ACID-compliant RDBMS which uses a shared nothing architecture. It includes both enterprise and community editions...
, a commercial startup based on ideas from the H-Store
H-Store
H-Store is an experimental database management system designed for online transaction processing applications that is being developed by a team at Brown University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Yale University....
project.
SciDB
In 2008, along with David DeWittDavid DeWitt
David J. DeWitt is the John P. Morgridge Professor of at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Professor DeWitt received a B.A. degree from Colgate University in 1970, and a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1976...
and researchers from Brown University
Brown University
Brown University is a private, Ivy League university located in Providence, Rhode Island, United States. Founded in 1764 prior to American independence from the British Empire as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations early in the reign of King George III ,...
, MIT, Portland State University
Portland State University
Portland State University is a public state urban university located in downtown Portland, Oregon, United States. Founded in 1946, it has the largest overall enrollment of any university in the state of Oregon, including undergraduate and graduate students. It is also the only public university in...
, SLAC, the University of Washington
University of Washington
University of Washington is a public research university, founded in 1861 in Seattle, Washington, United States. The UW is the largest university in the Northwest and the oldest public university on the West Coast. The university has three campuses, with its largest campus in the University...
, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Stonebraker started SciDB, an open-source DBMS specially designed for scientific research applications.
NoSQL
More recently, during 2010 and 2011, Stonebreaker has been a critic of the NoSQLNosql
In computing, NoSQL is a broad class of database management systems that differ from the classic model of the relational database management system in some significant ways. These data stores may not require fixed table schemas, usually avoid join operations, and typically scale horizontally...
movement.
Students
In addition to his contributions to academia and industry, Stonebraker has trained more than 30 students who have themselves contributed significantly to academia and industry. Notable students include:- 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 SybaseSybaseSybase, an SAP company, is an enterprise software and services company offering software to manage, analyze, and mobilize information, using relational databases, analytics and data warehousing solutions and mobile applications development platforms....
) - Diane GreeneDiane GreeneDiane Greene was a founder of VMware and the CEO from 1998 to 2008.Greene, Mendel Rosenblum, Scott Devine, Edward Wang and Edouard Bugnion founded VMware in 1998....
(co-founder and former CEO of VMWareVMwareVMware, Inc. is a company providing virtualization software founded in 1998 and based in Palo Alto, California, USA. The company was acquired by EMC Corporation in 2004, and operates as a separate software subsidiary ....
) - Paula Hawthorn (founder of Britton-Lee, formerly VP of Engineering of InformixInformixIBM Informix is a family of relational database management system developed by IBM. It is positioned as IBM's flagship data server for online transaction processing as well as integrated solutions...
) - Gerald Held (former VP of Engineering of OracleOracle CorporationOracle Corporation is an American multinational computer technology corporation that specializes in developing and marketing hardware systems and enterprise software products – particularly database management systems...
) - Joseph M. HellersteinJoseph M. HellersteinJoseph M. Hellerstein is professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley, where he works on database systems and computer networks...
(faculty at UC Berkeley) - Anant Jhingran (VP and CTO for IBMIBMInternational Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...
's Information Management Division) - Curt Kolovson (Architect at Hewlett-PackardHewlett-PackardHewlett-Packard Company or HP is an American multinational information technology corporation headquartered in Palo Alto, California, USA that provides products, technologies, softwares, solutions and services to consumers, small- and medium-sized businesses and large enterprises, including...
) - Clifford A. Lynch (executive director of the Coalition for Networked InformationCoalition for Networked InformationThe Coalition for Networked Information is an organization whose mission is to promote networked information technology as a way to further the advancement of intellectual collaboration and productivity. It is a joint initiative of the Association of Research Libraries as well as EDUCAUSE...
) - Mike Olson, former CEO of Sleepycat SoftwareSleepycat SoftwareSleepycat Software, Inc. was the company primarily responsible for maintaining the Berkeley DB packages from 1996 to 2006.Berkeley DB is a widely used and freely-licensed database software originally developed at the University of California, Berkeley for 4.4BSD Unix, and developers from that...
and current CEO of ClouderaClouderaCloudera Inc. is a Palo Alto-based enterprise software company which provides Apache Hadoop-based software and services. It contributes to Hadoop and related Apache projects and provides a distribution for Hadoop for the enterprise. Cloudera has two products: and... - Sunita Sarawagi (Associate professor, http://www.iitb.ac.in/IITIITIIT may refer to:*A number of institutes of technology, including:** Illinois Institute of Technology, a private Ph.D.-granting research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA** Indian Institutes of Technology, a group of higher education institutes in India...
Bombay]) - Margo SeltzerMargo SeltzerMargo Ilene Seltzer is a professor and researcher in computer systems. Currently she is the Herchel Smith Professor of Computer Science and a Harvard College Professor in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University, where she is active in the Systems Research Group.Dr...
(Professor of Computer Science at Harvard, founder and former CTO of Sleepycat) - Dale SkeenDale SkeenDale Skeen is the Chief Technology Officer and co-founder of Vitria Technology, Inc., which he founded in 1994 with Dr. JoMei Chang. He has more than 20 years experience in designing and implementing large-scale computing systems and has made technical advances in the areas of distributed computing...
(founder of Tibco, founder and CEO of Vitria)