Yesterday I got a chance to visit my Alma Mater -- Berkeley -- to celebrate with other database folks the achievements (scientific, personal and others) of Jim Gray, who as all of you know, went missing more than a year back in the Pacific. The tribute (not a memorial) was organized by many, but the hands of my advisor -- Mike Stonebraker -- were all over it, and I wanted to say personal thanks to him for such an informative, funny and poignant tribute. I am so proud to be associated with a community that respects and recognizes great people.
Jim's technical achievements are many. Let me name a few. First, as Bruce Lindsay pointed out, he is the father of transaction processing -- the thing that makes businesses go around. He is also a performance guru -- giving us the pre-cursors of the TPC-A through H that we all love and hate :) He is a person that transcends company boundaries (as one Microsoft exec said in the tribute, they were just paying his salary for his work for the whole community) -- exemplified by Terraserver and Sky Server.
But finally, and this came off in every speech -- he is a genuine human being -- a mentor for hundreds and a champion for science. We all miss him.
My last meeting with him was at Stanford, where he and I reminisced about the new programming languages -- PHP's and Ruby, and how he told me he too was playing with them and felt that architects who did not code (architecting by powerpoint) were of diminishing value. So for all his humanity and gentleness, he could be brutally honest too.
Beyond remembering Jim Gray, this was an occasion to meet all the colleagues that I had not met in a long time. I really love the database community.
Jim's technical achievements are many. Let me name a few. First, as Bruce Lindsay pointed out, he is the father of transaction processing -- the thing that makes businesses go around. He is also a performance guru -- giving us the pre-cursors of the TPC-A through H that we all love and hate :) He is a person that transcends company boundaries (as one Microsoft exec said in the tribute, they were just paying his salary for his work for the whole community) -- exemplified by Terraserver and Sky Server.
But finally, and this came off in every speech -- he is a genuine human being -- a mentor for hundreds and a champion for science. We all miss him.
My last meeting with him was at Stanford, where he and I reminisced about the new programming languages -- PHP's and Ruby, and how he told me he too was playing with them and felt that architects who did not code (architecting by powerpoint) were of diminishing value. So for all his humanity and gentleness, he could be brutally honest too.
Beyond remembering Jim Gray, this was an occasion to meet all the colleagues that I had not met in a long time. I really love the database community.
anant, he was certainly an incredible man. i'm not sure if you've had a chance to see this, but a while back i worked on jim's episode of "behind the code" from msft and had a chance to interview tons of his colleagues past and present (from blasgen and bell to barlcay and chaudhuri) - it's up at channel 9 and freely available for those who may enjoy seeing the final piece:
http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Behind_The_Code
Posted by: dave | June 02, 2008 at 08:11 AM