Michael Stonebraker

Biographical Summary:

Dr. Stonebraker is Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California at Berkeley, where he joined the faculty in 1971. He is widely recognized as one of the world's foremost experts in database technology and is noted for his insight in operating systems and expert systems.

He received a Bachelor of Science degree from Princeton University and Master of Science and Doctor of Philosophy degrees from the University of Michigan. Dr. Stonebraker has held visiting professorships at the Pontifico Universitade Catholique (PUC), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; the University of California, Santa Cruz; and the University of Grenoble, France.

Dr. Stonebraker founded Ingres Corp. in 1980 and served on the company's board of directors until 1993. (Ingres Corp. was purchased by Computer Associates in 1994.) INGRES, the company's primary product, was a commercialization of Dr. Stonebraker's INGRES research project into relational database management systems (RDBMS) at Berkeley. Ingres Corp. has been widely recognized as a leader in RDBMS technology.

More recently, Dr. Stonebraker has managed another research project known as POSTGRES, one of the most advanced such projects ever undertaken on the Berkeley campus. In August 1992, Dr. Stonebraker co-founded Illustra Information Technologies, Inc. in order to commercialize his research in object-relational database technology. He is a member of the company's board of directors and serves as its Chief Technology Officer.

Dr. Stonebraker is currently focusing on DBMS support for visualization environments and on next-generation distributed DBMSs. In addition, he leads a project which is developing alternative data management strategies for NASA's Earth Observing System (EOS).

His professional activities include:

  1. General Chairman of SIGMOD annual conference, 1987
  2. Member of SIGMOD Advisory Committee, 1989 to present
  3. Program Chairman of SIGMOD annual conference, 1992
  4. Member of Technical Advisory Committee for Citicorp, DB Software, and Bull
Dr. Stonebraker is the author of numerous papers, including (select titles):
  1. Stonebraker, M.,"The Design of the POSTGRES Storage System," Proc. 1987 VLDB Conference, Brighton, England, September 1987.
  2. Stonebraker, M. et. al., "The POSTGRES Rules Systsem," Proc. 1987 Data Engineering Conference, Los Angeles, CA, February 1987 (also reprinted in IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, December 1988).
  3. Stonebraker, M., "Future Trends in Data Base Systems," Proc. 1988 IEEE Data Engineering Conference, Los Angeles, CA, Feb. 1988 (reprinted in IEEE Knowledge and Data Engineering, Sept. 1989).
  4. Stonebraker, M., et. al., "The Implementation of POSTGRES," IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, March 1990.
  5. Stonebraker, M., el. al., "On Rules, Procedures, Caching and View in Data Base Systems," Proceedings 1990 ACM-SIGMOD Conference on Management of Data, Atlantic City, NJ, May 1990.

Richard Troy (rtroy@postgres.Berkeley.EDU)
Last modified: $Date: 1995/12/23 04:12:15 $