Michael Stonebraker

Michael Ralph Stonebraker is an American computer scientist specializing in database systems who earned his PhD from the University of Michigan in 1971 and built much of his career at the University of California, Berkeley, where he created the Ingres and Postgres database systems, both highly influential prototypes that shaped the design of later commercial relational and object-relational databases. Stonebraker went on to found or co-found a series of database companies built around these research systems and their successors, including Ingres Corporation, Illustra, Vertica, VoltDB and StreamBase Systems, and he served as chief technical officer of Informix. Later, while affiliated with MIT, he led development of newer specialized database systems including C-Store, H-Store, SciDB and DBOS, aimed at column-oriented storage, high-throughput transaction processing and scientific data management. Stonebraker received the ACM Turing Award in 2014, often described as the Nobel Prize for computing, and the IEEE John von Neumann Medal in 2005.