Database Column contributor: Michael Stonebraker

Dr. Stonebraker is a co-founder and the CTO of Vertica Systems. He has been a pioneer of database research and technology for more than a quarter of a century. He was the main architect of the INGRES relational DBMS, and the object-relational DBMS, POSTGRES. These prototypes were developed at the University of California at Berkeley where Dr. Stonebraker was a professor of computer science for 25 years. More recently at MIT., Dr. Stonebraker was a co-architect of the Aurora stream processing engine as well as the C-Store high-performance read-oriented database engine. He is the founder of four venture-capital backed startups that have commercialized these prototypes: Ingres Corporation, Illustra Information Technologies (acquired by Informix Corporation), StreamBase Systems, and Vertica.

Professor Stonebraker is the author of scores of research papers on database technology, operating systems and the architecture of system software. He was awarded the 2005 IEEE John vonNeumann Medal as well as the ACM System Software Award in 1992, for his work on INGRES. Additionally, he was awarded the first annual Innovation award by the ACM SIGMOD special interest group in 1994, and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1997. He is also an ACM Fellow. Dr. Stonebraker earned a B.S.E.E. degree from Princeton University in 1965 and a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1971.