Stonebraker, Michael

Michael Ralph Stonebraker (born October 11, 1943) is an American computer scientist specializing in database systems. Through a series of academic prototypes and commercial startups, Stonebraker's research and products are central to many relational databases. He is also the founder of many database companies, including Ingres Corporation, Illustra, Paradigm4, StreamBase Systems, Tamr, Vertica, VoltDB and Hopara, and served as chief technical officer of Informix. For his contributions to database research, Stonebraker received the 2014 Turing Award, often described as "the Nobel Prize for computing." Stonebraker's career can be broadly divided into two phases: his time at University of California, Berkeley when he focused on relational database management systems such as Ingres and Postgres, and, starting in 2001, at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where he developed more novel data management techniques such as C-Store, H-Store, SciDB and DBOS. Stonebraker is currently a professor emeritus at UC Berkeley and an adjunct professor at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He is also known as an editor for the book Readings in Database Systems.