- Editor:
- Michael L. Brodie
ACM Books
At the ACM Awards banquet in June 2017, during the 50th anniversary celebration of the A.M. Turing Award, ACM announced the launch of the ACM A.M. Turing Book Series, a sub-series of ACM Books, to celebrate the winners of the A.M. Turing Award, computing's highest honor, the "Nobel Prize" for computing. This series aims to highlight the accomplishments of awardees, explaining their major contributions of lasting importance in computing.
"Making Databases Work: The Pragmatic Wisdom of Michael Stonebraker," the first book in the series, celebrates Mike's contributions and impact. What accomplishments warranted computing's highest honor? How did Stonebraker do it? Who is Mike Stonebraker---researcher, professor, CTO, lecturer, innovative product developer, serial entrepreneur, and decades-long leader, and research evangelist for the database community. This book describes Mike's many contributions and evaluates them in light of the Turing Award.
The book describes, in 36 chapters, the unique nature, significance, and impact of Mike's achievements in advancing modern database systems over more than 40 years. The stories involve technical concepts, projects, people, prototype systems, failures, lucky accidents, crazy risks, startups, products, venture capital, and lots of applications that drove Mike Stonebraker's achievements and career. Even if you have no interest in databases at all, you'll gain insights into the birth and evolution of Turing Award-worthy achievements from the perspectives of 39 remarkable computer scientists and professionals.
Today, data is considered the world's most valuable resource ("The Economist," May 6, 2017), whether it is in the tens of millions of databases used to manage the world's businesses and governments, in the billions of databases in our smartphones and watches, or residing elsewhere, as yet unmanaged, awaiting the elusive next generation of database systems. Every one of the millions or billions of databases includes features that are celebrated by the 2014 A.M. Turing Award and are described in this book.
Book Downloads
A Data Management Technology Kairometer
OLTP through the looking glass, and what we found there
Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) databases include a suite of features---disk-resident B-trees and heap files, locking-based concurrency control, support for multi-threading---that were optimized for computer technology of the late 1970's. Advances ...
"One size fits all": an idea whose time has come and gone
The last 25 years of commercial DBMS development can be summed up in a single phrase: "One size fits all". This phrase refers to the fact that the traditional DBMS architecture (originally designed and optimized for business data processing) has been ...
The end of an architectural era: it's time for a complete rewrite
In previous papers [SC05, SBC+07], some of us predicted the end of "one size fits all" as a commercial relational DBMS paradigm. These papers presented reasons and experimental evidence that showed that the major RDBMS vendors can be outperformed by 1--...
C-store: a column-oriented DBMS
- Mike Stonebraker,
- Daniel J. Abadi,
- Adam Batkin,
- Xuedong Chen,
- Mitch Cherniack,
- Miguel Ferreira,
- Edmond Lau,
- Amerson Lin,
- Sam Madden,
- Elizabeth O'Neil,
- Pat O'Neil,
- Alex Rasin,
- Nga Tran,
- Stan Zdonik
This paper presents the design of a read-optimized relational DBMS that contrasts sharply with most current systems, which are write-optimized. Among the many differences in its design are: storage of data by column rather than by row, careful coding ...
The implementation of POSTGRES
Currently, POSTGRES is about 90 000 lines of code in C and is being used by assorted "bold and brave" early users. The system has been constructed by a team of five part-time students led by a full-time chief programmer over the last three years. During ...
