On Tuesday 13:30 – 15:00

The Land Sharks are on the Squawk Box

(How Riding a Bicycle across America and Building Postgres Have a Lot in Common)

Abstract
This Turing Award talk intermixes a bicycle ride across America during the summer of 1988 with the design, construction and commercialization of Postgres during the late 80’s and early 90’s. Striking parallels are observed, leading to a discussion of what it takes to build a new DBMS. Also, indicated are the roles that perseverance and serendipity played in both endeavors.

Presenter
Michael Stonebraker

Bio
Michael Stonebraker is an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at MIT and recipient of the 2014 A.M. Turing Award from the ACM for his fundamental contributions to the concepts and practices underlying modern database systems. He specializes in database management systems and data integration, and has been a pioneer of database research and technology for more than 40 years. He is the author of scores of papers in this area. He was the main architect of the INGRES relational DBMS, the object-relational DBMS POSTGRES, and the federated data system, Mariposa; and principal architect of the C-Store column store database, H-Store main-memory OLTP engine, and SciDB array engine. He has started nine start-up companies to commercialize these database technologies and, more recently, Big Data technologies (Vertica, VoltDB, Paradigm4, Tamr). He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.