Jim Gray

James Nicholas Gray was an American computer scientist who earned his PhD in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley in 1969 and worked at IBM, Tandem Computers, Digital Equipment Corporation and Microsoft, where he joined as a Technical Fellow in 1995. At IBM San Jose research laboratory, Gray contributed to System R, the prototype relational database system that introduced the SQL query language and directly shaped the design of later commercial database products. Gray developed foundational techniques in transaction processing and database reliability, including methods for granular database locking, the two-phase commit protocol for coordinating distributed transactions, and the five-minute rule for deciding when data should be cached in memory versus stored on disk. He received the ACM Turing Award in 1998 for seminal contributions to database and transaction processing research and technical leadership in system implementation, and he disappeared at sea off the coast of California in January 2007, later declared legally dead.