Michael Stonebreaker won the 2014 Turing Award

Michael Stonebreaker

Professor Michael Stonebraker from the Department of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, known for his revolutionary developments in the field of DBMS and as the founder of several companies in this field, was named the winner of the 2014 Turing Award , which is considered to be the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in Informatics .

In particular, Stonebreaker developed two Ingres and Postgre DBMSs, which had a significant impact on the development of the industry, in particular, having influenced the development of many other projects, including IBM Informix and EMC Greenplum.
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For the first time Google-sponsored prize fund of $ 1 million will be paid in full.

The organizing committee of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM, Association for Computing Machinery) announced its decision today .

In a published statement, ACM says that Stonebriker "invented many concepts that are used in almost all modern databases ... and founded many companies that successfully commercialized its innovative developments in the field of DBMS."

As a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stonebriker often joked that he himself didn’t know what he had invented for 30 years until many marketing companies appeared that started talking about “big data”. "And here I realized that I was studying this area for most of my academic life."

Among the companies that the scientist founded are VoltDB, Tamr, Paradigm4 and Vertica (the latter was acquired by Hewlett-Packard in 2011 for $ 340 million).

Its Ingres DBMS was one of the world's first relational databases, which made it possible to store data in a more organized way and which are now considered the corporate data storage standard. During the creation of this technology, many colleagues believed that relational DBMS could not take a step from the theoretical description to the practical implementation.

At the same time, Ingres ideas in combination with object-oriented programming were implemented in Postgres.

Other Stonebreaker projects include C-Store, H-Store and SciDB.

It is important to note that in those times when the term “open source” did not exist at all, Stonebriker without question published the source codes of many of his programs, giving them to the public domain.