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Stonebraker Wins IEEE’s von Neumann Medal


By Yvonne L. Lee
June 15, 2005 —  The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in May awarded database pioneer Michael Stonebraker its computer science award that recognizes a lifetime of achievements in the industry.

“I feel privileged and blessed,” said Stonebraker, whose career began more than 30 years ago. “There have been [15] other people who have been given this award, all of whom are household names. I get to join very rarified company.” Stonebraker, a resident of Manchester, N.H., is currently both an adjunct professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and CTO of StreamBase systems, which is working on using SQL technology with streaming data.

Stonebraker started the Ingres database in 1973. Ingres and IBM’s System R were the first relational databases, and all existing databases evolved from one of those two, according to Stonebraker. DB2 and Oracle sprang from System R, while Informix, Computer Associates’ Ingres r3, and Sybase came from Ingres.

He also started the open-source Postgres object-relational database, which first was used to tie geographic information to a relational database. It also stretched databases from beyond business uses to scientific and engineering uses, he said.

Both the Ingres and Postgres projects began as academic work when he was a faculty member of the University of California at Berkeley collaborating with professors from other universities, he said. However, when Arizona State University attempted to automate its student records with Ingres, the Unix operating system on which it ran lacked a version of COBOL to manipulate the data, he said. That prompted him and his colleagues to start a company to support the database and to enhance it with the supporting applications, such as a report writer, which were available with commercial databases.

“A lot of the academic prototypes I’ve done since then have had commercial potential and have been commercialized,” he said. “It was just kind of a happy accident.”

His current work at StreamBase involves applying SQL to the processing demands of high-performance real-time streaming applications, particularly those where data is collected immediately from sensors, such as RFID tags.

Stonebraker said he designated his honorarium to go to the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation. Stonebraker will formally receive the medal at the 2005 IEEE Honors Ceremony on June 18 in Chantilly, Va.

von Newmann Winners


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